Tag: play

BR#9 – Accidental Death Of An Anarchist

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Another new playwright has crossed my path. Dario Fo wrote Accidental Death Of An Anarchist in response to the 1969 death of an anarchist in police custody Milan. He had been accused of the bombing of the Agricultural Bank which had resulted in the deaths of sixteen people. While in custody he, according to the official account at the time, committed suicide by jumping out of the window on the fourth floor of the police headquarters. Ten years later three fascists were convicted of the crime, some of whom were agents of the secret police, and in court proceedings it was determined that the major actors behind the bombing had been senior ministers and Generals who were condemned before being acquitted. The state once more protected it’s own while allowing those at the bottom who actually committed the act itself to go down for it. The play was written prior to this final outcome and was partly in response to a dearth of reporting from both sides of the political spectrum, the right-wing for obvious reasons and the Communists because they’re little more than power hungry political stooges themselves.

The play is set one week after the event and Fo uses the character titled Maniac to highlight the ridiculous nature of the police account of events, their incompetence and as a vehicle to get his political message across. I’m sure there’s a name for this type of character in a play but I forget what I learnt in school. While serious and dry approaches to storytelling always have their place, there is a particular way satire manages to express an idea and create an understanding in the audience. It is more accessible, despite it being on a serious topic comedy allows people to take it in without feeling they need to immediately react in a serious manner. Fo does this expertly and through his use of the Maniac manages to create a situation in which the police expose their own corruption and the left wing reporter her own hypocrisy.

To quote the Maniac in one of his more lucid moments;

“Why not ask yourself, Miss Feletti, what sort of democracy requires the services of dogs such as these? I’ll tell you. Bourgeois democracy which wears a thin skin of human rights to keep out the cold, but when things hot up, when the rotten plots of the ruling class fail to silence ours demands, when they have put the population on the dole queue and squeezed the other half dry with wage cuts to keep themselves in profit, when they have run out of promises, and you reformists have failed to keep the masses in order for them; well then they shed their skins and dump you, as they did in Chile*, and set their wildest dogs loose on us all”

*While events in Chile happened after the original was written, the text I read from was translated and adapted in the 1980s hence the reference.

BR#3 – Enemies

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I say book review but this is a play, and which it is a book, maybe I should call it Play Review or PR#1? Despite reading plays at school and studying drama it is only really in the last year I’ve discovered I really enjoy them. Obviously they’re different in how they share a story with the reader but without the descriptive part you take the time to enjoy the language of conversation and the scene set in this way. There is also the added bonus that you can read a play in a couple of hours and feel like you read a book in one day as opposed to one month which is extremely satisfying.

Enemies then is a play by the Russian playwright Maxim Gorky. It is set in 1905 just prior to the 1905 Revolution which was a precursor in a way to events in 1917. The early signs of later events are spread throughout the text, with the workers rebelling against the factory owners and the authoritarian response in return. This was a time of Tsarist oppression, as had always been but also of liberalisation of the country, or attempts at least. Gorky, who himself was involved in events in 1905, does a good job showing there to be little fundamental differences between the more dictatorial bosses and the ones who feign liberal ideals while continuing to depend upon the workers struggles for their vaulted positions. Plays can have a habit of lacking subtlety with characters as they have such a short time to get a message across and this play is no different. The bad guys are buffoons and the good attempting in vain to get across the message that change is on it’s way. Interestingly enough with the knowledge of hindsight, there is something eery in the premonitions about what is to come. This was written in 1906 after the 1905 Revolution was crushed but over ten years before the 1917 one succeeded and we all know what was to come afterwards.

Generally I’m a fanboy of Russian literature and plays, they seem to understand suffering in a way others can only guess at. While this is not grim, it is what it foretells that really makes you stand up and pay attention. You feel like you are watching through a window as the seeds of history are being planted. There is something admirable and courageous in it.

Interestingly enough the text I read was from a Royal Shakespeare Company performance from 1971 and quite remarkably looking at the cast list it included Helen Mirren, Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. The seeds of revolution being planted by the seeds of future cinema. Quite unbelievable. To have been there and not known, can we ever at the time?