Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo, adapted by Huang Jisu and Meng Jinghui

Meng Jinghui’s production of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist opened in Beijing in
1998, a year after Fo won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Meng’s production broke all box office
records, furthering his reputation as China’s foremost avant-garde director. His choice of
material and approach to his work have resulted in a style best described as playful socio-
political critique. (His earlier productions include adaptations of Waiting for Godot, The Balcony,
and The Bedbug, as well as original collaborations such as I Love XXX, Rhinoceros in Love, and
Head Without Tail.)

Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist premiered in Italy in 1970 and was prompted by real
events a year earlier, when a bomb exploded in Milan, killing sixteen people and injuring nearly
one hundred others. A group of anarchist militants was charged with the crime, including
Giuseppe Pinelli, who “fell” to his death from a fourth-floor window of police headquarters three
days later. In a series of contradictory statements, the police claimed it was suicide, and both the
authorities and the media remained virtually silent. Subsequently, the judge in charge of the
investigation dismissed the case as an “accidental death.”

Fo’s original play begins with a prologue (mainly a disclaimer intended to protect his production
against censorship), which was dropped from printed versions of the text. The action takes place
in a police office, with a window dominating the set. A “maniac” infiltrates the police
headquarters and, through a series of hilarious gags and disguises (including a magistrate, a
forensic expert, a bishop), unveils the corruption practiced by the most sacred institutions of state
power: the Police, the Court, and the Church. The maniac unmasks the web of lies, then—
unmasked himself—handcuffs the policemen and the female journalist investigating the case,
threatening to blow everyone up with a bomb. The original ending indicates via offstage noises
that the maniac has jumped out of the window with the bomb, while in the definitive version he
reveals he has tape-recorded everything and will go to the media.

The Chinese Huang/Meng version of the play keeps the same basic background plot, but has
several notable differences. (Note: Meng used Huang’s adaptation as his main text but made
significant changes during the rehearsal process—the text/production that resulted from this
process is hereto referred to as “Meng’s version.”) Meng’s version reinstates the prologue, and
then opens in a police station1, where three policemen have just “accidentally” beaten to death an
anarchist who is hanging from the ceiling in a sack. Upon throwing the corpse out the window,
they realize they must cover up the murder. They force a detained madman (the maniac), via
coercion and drugs, to help them come up with a story; but as they rehearse the story, they
realize it is so incoherent that it could only work as theatre of the absurd. Finally, the maniac
refuses to cooperate and denounces the police, the government, and the populace (the audience),
whereupon the back of the stage crashes to the ground and the play ends.

1
Meng’s set was minimalist, basically a bare space that recalls traditional Chinese theatre aesthetics. The only visual elements of
the set were a huge painting of Fo’s face, some chairs, a pile of bricks and a few other objects, and a slipknot hanging from the
ceiling symbolizing the window. This mise en scene self-reflexively hints at implicating the theatre as well as other institutions.
Meng’s set was minimalist, basically a bare space that recalls traditional Chinese theater
aesthetics as well as the spare aesthetic popularized by Grotowski. Both the visual arrangments
and the interaction of actors’ bodies with the space reflect Meng’s devotion to Meyerhold and
integration of biomechanics in virtually all of his work. The only objects on stage were a huge
painting of Fo’s face, some chairs, a pile of bricks, a few other props, and a slipknot hanging
from the ceiling symbolizing the window. This mise en scene self-reflexively hints at implicating
the theater in addition to other institutions.

Meng shifts temporal and spatial references between Italy of the 1960s and China of the 1990s,
and fills his production with intertextual references both literary (East European poets, famous
Chinese dramas, contemporary pop song lyrics, Hollywood films, corporate advertisements) and
stylistic (melding realism, alienation, clowning, parody, farce, and absurdism). In so doing, he
creates a critique of present-day China alongside the universal human ills of corruption, violence,
and oppression. (One recurring motif in the play is the neo-imperialist influence of the United
States.) True to Fo’s spirit, Meng’s version is a joy-ride as well as an eye-opener: his goal in his
theatre praxis is to entertain, educate, and “egg on” (dou 逗 i.e. provoke). As Meng did in 1998,
productions today nearly twenty years later—whether revivals under Meng’s direction in China
or (as is the case at Cornell University this fall) adaptations of the Huang/Meng version
overseas—seek to maintain both Fo and Meng’s fast-pasted antics and the basic plot structure of
the central events and general identities of the characters, while particularizing the physicality,
language, and cultural nuances to the contemporary experiences of the actors and audience.