The Maniac as the Apocryphal Intervento: How Form Determines Substance in Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist

Abstract

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) is one of famed Italian play-wright Dario Fo, written as a response the neo-fascist tension that reached a boiling point in during the ‘Hot Autumn.’ A period of immense turmoil in late 20th -cemtury Italy. The play draws from the conventions of the Brechtian form and commedia dell’arte, aptly transforming them into mechanisms that can help both the play and spectators subvert the high cultures of Gramscian cultural hegemony, absorbed into ADA’s comic microcosm. This essay explores how political and theatrical realms are immortalised and then pit against each other through the course of the play, with the character of the Maniac acting as a rhetorical device acting as the connection between the two. In essence, this paper believes that Style is considered over substance in many of the styles of theatre Accidental Death operates within; the stylistic elements that quantitatively constitute the Brechtian form, commedia dell’arte, and farce allow them to subvert the ‘high cultures’ that are held culpable in Gramscian cultural hegemony, all of which ADA absorbs into its comic microcosm. This leads to a sustained paradox between the political and theatrical dimensions of the play, where the theatrical lends credence to the political though the use of fictional formal elements.