Preview: Accidental Death of an Anarchist

I vividly remember seeing Gavin Richards’ original adaptation on Channel 4 in the mid 1980s, and it was one of the most astonishing things I had ever seen. A powerful message about corruption, brutality, misogyny and the abuse of power by a patriarchal establishment, but staged within the structure of a knockabout farce that broke the fourth wall and ended up invading the TV studio, this was heady and rare stuff – and on prime time TV – in those pre-internet days.

When I saw that the Lyric Hammersmith was producing a new version by SLT favourite Tom Basden, I couldn’t get tickets fast enough. It was a hilarious, hard-hitting night out (so good I saw it twice), and I knew I wanted SLT to do a production once the rights were available. And here we are…

The original play was produced in 1970, in reaction to real-life events surrounding a death in police custody in Milan. Astonishingly, many of the farcical scenes were based directly on statements and events that emerged during the subsequent trial. Basden sticks closely to the original plot, but the decision to set it in London in the present day jolts us out of any comfort zone that we might have in imagining that police misconduct and brutality are something alien that “couldn’t happen here”.

References to Sarah Everard, Stephen Lawrence, Chris Kaba, and to the Met’s complicity in the phone hacking, undercover spy cops and countless other scandals have an immediacy that really hits home to a British audience, and need none of the exposition that previous versions have had to include when talking about less familiar abuses in Italy. The script is as tight as one would expect from Basden, packed with gags that deliver a series of sharp satirical punches.

On a side note, it’s a pleasure to see that the play is now credited both to Dario Fo and his lifelong collaborator, his wife Franca Rame. For many years her name never appeared on the plays they co-created, her contribution erased by the very patriarchal attitudes the works so often ridicule.

Sides split with laughter, an enquiring mind about authority, and a thoroughly engaging anti-fascist earworm.

A play with so much physical comedy business is both challenging and an opportunity for the cast to excel. The collaboration and imagination they have thrown into bringing it to (larger than) life has been astonishing. The range of props has at times tested us to the limits!

Contrary to common belief, we never see the Anarchist. We are in a police station where some months previously a train driver, who may or may not have been an anarchist, fell to his death from a 4^th floor window in the course of being interrogated about a bomb placed at a railway station. There has been an inquiry into the “accidental” death, but that was such a whitewash that a new inquiry is about to take place.

A man we know only as The Maniac (Ben Farren) happens to be in the police station, arrested by Inspector Burton (Chris Stooke), and decides to impersonate the judge carrying out the new inquiry. Notoriously brutal Detective Inspector Daisy (Adam David Lawrence) and inept Superintendent Curry (Stephen Dyer) were the interrogators, assisted by Constable Joseph (Luke McGuire), and the Maniac unpicks the inconsistencies in their statements, humiliating and ridiculing them while exposing their guilt for all to see.

When investigative journalist Fi Phelan (Han Evans) arrives for an interview with the Superintendent, the cops desperately try to conceal the existence of the new inquiry from her, and the world spirals further into chaos and hilarity.

No laughing matter