It’s just theatre! It’s not real! That’s what the character known only as the Maniac insists as he throws on increasingly silly costumes, shoves his head through walls and forces a group of hapless, corrupt policemen to sing in harmony. But then, every so often, he spits out some statistic about the Met Police – less than 1% of complaints about the police lead to disciplinary action – and amid the bomb-blast comedy of this institutionally funny play, reality comes crashing back in.
When legendary Italian theatremaker Dario Fo wrote Accidental Death of an Anarchist in 1970 he based it on the real case of a man who ‘fell’ out of a fourth floor window while being interrogated by police in Milan. After successful stage adaptations of Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Tom Basden (ITV’s Plebs, BBC’s Here We Go) keeps the buffoonery and savagery of Fo’s original play, but updates it to become a farce-filled invective against the failures of the Met Police. “It’s bants!” exclaims the Maniac at one point, “like when we take selfies with murder victims.”
