• The play was written in 1970 at a time of great tension in Italy. The ‘autunno caldo’ [hot autumn] of 1969 had seen millions of workers coming out on strikes and a new Labour Charter had been signed granting working people significant new protections and rights. Some believed Italy was on the verge of socialism; some of those, particularly on the far right, were determined to stop it.
• There had been several terrorist attacks by right-wing groups, covertly supported by elements of the police and the state, who pretended that anarchists and communists were behind these bombings, killings and kidnappings. They hoped to discredit the left and slow the drift towards socialism.
• One specific example was the bomb left in a bank on the Piazza Fontana in Milan on 12 December 1969, the day after the Labour Charter was signed. Anarchists were accused though it later became clear it was planted by a fascist group. The police arrested several anarchists, one of whom, Giuseppe Pinelli [pronounced Joo-ZEP-pay pi-NELLy] was found dead around midnight on 15-16 December after having apparently jumped from the 4th floor of the Milan police headquarters, where he was being interrogated.
• A later autopsy suggested that he was dead before he hit the ground, which strongly suggested that during questioning he may have been beaten up so badly that he’d died – and the police had thrown his body from the window to disguise the crime.
• Many people – not just those on the left – were very sceptical about the police’s account. A book about the affair, Strage di Stato [pronounced STRAH-jay dee STUH-toe and means ‘State Massacre’], was published in June 1970 and had to be reprinted repeatedly, selling tens of thousands of copies.
• In April 1970, the Milan chief of police, Commissioner Calabresi, sued a leftist newspaper, Lotta Continua [pronounced LOTT-a con-TIN-oo-ah and means ‘Constant Struggle’] for libel after it published cartoons suggesting he was responsible for the death of Pinelli.
• Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame had been very successful actors in mainstream commercial theatre, but Fo’s increasingly left-wing politics had made him feel uncomfortable performing to a largely middle-class audience. So he abandoned the mainstream and set up a new left-wing theatre company, La Comune, to perform to audiences with more radical potential. Accidental Death of an Anarchist was their first full-scale production.
• Fo wrote, developed and rehearsed the play while the Lotta Continua trial was proceeding, changing the play to incorporate new revelations and inconsistencies in the police’s story that had come out in the trial.
• There were repercussions for many people of the Pinelli case. Commissioner Calabresi was shot dead outside his home in 1972 by left-wing militants in retribution for Pinelli’s murder. Dario Fo was denounced by the Pope and refused entry on one occasion to the USA; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997, some Italian authors were horrified that a comic actor should receive such a prestigious award. More seriously, Fo’s wife and fellow actor, Franca Rame, was kidnapped by fascists in 1973 who brutally (and sexually) assaulted her. Pinelli, however, was posthumously cleared of any involvement in the Piazza Fontana bombing in 1975.

• Dario Fo believed that popular theatre forms (clowning, comedy, slapstick, farce, satire, stand-up, etc.) were politically powerful because they emerged from the experience of the downtrodden and were a form of resistance to their oppressors – in part through laughing at the powerful.
• Farce is sometimes seen as escapist, apolitical, or as a rather ‘bourgeois’ (middle class) form. It sets up some artificial misunderstandings and constantly threatens that the characters’ illicit behaviour will be revealed, but everything is straightened out in the end. Dario Fo, however, claimed that ‘farce is an invention of the people’ and was determined to restore the popular radicalism to farce in Anarchist.
• The central character in Anarchist is the ‘matto’ (translated as ‘madman’ or ‘maniac’). He brings a kind of chaos onto the stage and into the lives of the police officers, though pretending that he is going to sort everything out. His name is partly ironic, deriving from Fo’s sense that the world is mad and in the play only the maniac is truly sane.
• Another tradition Dario Fo draws on in this play is Commedia dell’Arte [co-MAY-dee-a dell-AR-tay], which dates back at least to the sixteenth century. In Commedia, each performer would specialise in one of a range of about a dozen stock characters: the pretentious intellectual, the hopeless lovers, the miserly father, the wily servant. The rough story would be fixed beforehand, but the actors would improvise around that script in expert comic routines. The ‘maniac’ figure here draws somewhat on the stock Commedia character of ‘Arlecchino’ (AR-la-KEE-no, or ‘Harlequin’ in English) whose wily energy reveals the pomposity and delusions of those in authority and getting the servants and other downtrodden people what they want.
• You might also compare him to characters in Shakespeare who are granted, through madness or some other aspect, the ability to speak truth to power: for example, the Fool in King Lear or Hamlet himself.
• The play’s premiere coincided with the first anniversary of Pinelli’s death, which helped it become an intervention in the public debate.
• Dario Fo was a superb comic actor who often improvised in performance; this allowed him to respond very directly to the most topical developments of the day. Audiences would go to a play like this rather like the way US television viewers watch late-night satirists like Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, John Oliver and others – to find out what has been happening and laughing at the powerful.
• ‘La Comune’ was a private theatre club, meaning that you had to become a member before you could buy a ticket. This meant that it was exempt from the state censorship of theatre; but it also meant that the audience were members of the theatre company. This was in itself as political act, the theatre company helping to build not just an audience but a movement. Within a year, there were 30,000 members of La Comune, larger than many mainstream theatres.
• Fo’s company toured the play, always seeking to perform to working-class audiences, who, he felt, would respond most directly to his work. Typically, the company would stay in the theatre after the performance and there would be discussion about the issues raised – and any issues local to the area and the audience. This was all part of the political activism of the theatrical tour.

• Dario Fo was a believer in the political power of comedy, saying once ‘it’s no wonder dictatorial governments always forbid laughter and satire first, rather than drama’. Do you agree?
• Fo was a revolutionary – he believed not just that there were corrupt individuals in the system, but that the whole system was corrupt. How does the play widen the criticism from the individual police officers to the whole political system?
• ‘Catharsis’ is a term used by the philosopher Aristotle, in his book on tragedy, to describe a kind of release of emotions, a way of restoring good mental balance. Fo has spoken about wanting his comedies to arouse emotions without releasing them: he wanted you to get angry and stay angry or to laugh at the absurdities of state corruption and stay laughing at them. How does he try to ensure this in Anarchist?
• Fo was influenced by Brecht. This might seem curious, given that Brecht often seemed to encourage an attitude of detachment, while Fo’s wild comedy seems to provoke intense and emotional response. Where might we see Brecht’s influence in Anarchist?
• The Maniac is a very physical role – he has to disguise himself repeatedly, making quick changes, transforming himself into a kind of puppet at times. What kind of skills would you need for this and what effect would this have in performance?
• The play is very specific to the details of the Pinelli case from 1969. If the play were put on now, how might you adapt the text to make it more relevant to your own place and time?
• Think of some recent shocking, scandalous or absurd political event. (I’m writing in November 2022, so things that strike me are Boris Johnson’s ‘partygate’ scandals; Liz Truss’s 44-day stint as Prime Minister; the January 6th attack on the Capitol in the US; MP and former Health Secretary Matt Hancock leaving his constituents in the lurch to go on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here...). How might you find the comic form within these stories and create a show like Anarchist but about your story?

• Despite its specific origins, Accidental Death of an Anarchist has been produced hundreds of times in dozens of countries around the world.
• It has attracted controversy but has also been very successful (the first British production eventually transferred to the West End).
• Dario Fo criticised some productions for being too crude, for treating the police characters as cartoon-like and simplistic, and overdoing the grotesque physical humour. You might like to discuss why these are bad ideas and what effect that would have on the comedy and politics of Anarchist.

All links were working in November 2022

• There’s a very helpful BBC documentary about Dario Fo, first broadcast in 1984. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/olPEzBOuLGM
• The first British production of the play was by the left-wing fringe theatre company Belt & Braces. It transferred to the West End and later was performed on TV. You can watch that televised production here: https://youtu.be/TqKfwC70YZI
• Dario Fo’s play was performed on Italian television in the late seventies and you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/XwBDKfaZ1Jk It’s in Italian but even if you don’t speak the language, you might find it interesting to look at a small sequence to get a sense of the performing style. In the sequence from 1hr30mins, the female journalist is about to arrive and Dario Fo, as the maniac, decides to adopt an absurd disguise.

• Hirst, David L. Dario Fo and Franca Rame. London: Macmillan, 1989.
• Fo, Dario. The Tricks of the Trade. Translated by Joe Farrell. London: Methuen, 1991. This is Fo’s account of the popular performing style he championed, claiming a lineage that goes back to the medieval era.
• Mitchell, Tony. Dario Fo: People's Court Jester. Updated and Expanded ed. London: Methuen, 1999.
• Behan, Tom. Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre. London: Pluto, 2000.

You might find it interesting to look at some other farces like What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton which uses farce to subvert ideas about gender and sexuality or Noises Off by Michael Frayn, which is brilliant, but, by contrast, very non-political.

Other Dario Fo plays that you might usefully compare to Anarchist include the farce Can’t Play! Won’t Pay! (1974) and the series of monologues Mistero Buffo (1969), which retell mainly Bible stories in comic, physical theatre style, often incorporating the subversive perspectives of ordinary working people.