There is a fascinating role reversal going on in London theatre. Behind the elegant Corinthian facade of the Theatre Royal Haymarket, an ebullient satire on police corruption, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, has arrived by way of the Sheffield Crucible and the Lyric Hammersmith. Meanwhile Somerset Maugham’s The Circle, a Haymarket staple over the last century, has just enjoyed a triumphant revival at the off-West End venue of the Orange Tree, Richmond. Delighted as I am at the switch that puts political theatre in the commercial heartland, I came out of the Haymarket pondering how best to arouse an audience to a state of savage indignation.
The latest very amusing Accidental Death is a new adaptation by Tom Basden of a popular 1970 classic by Dario Fo and Franca Rame about the defenestration of a man in police custody. The story has been anglicised and updated but, since there is no reference in the programme to the historical case on which it is based, the young couple next to me understandably took it to be pure fiction. I reminded them that Fo and Rame were recreating a situation in which Giuseppe Pinelli, a Milanese railway worker, was falsely accused of a series of railway-station bombings and mysteriously fell out of a fourth-floor window at police HQ.
