Making a farce of the police
The road may have started in 1970s Milan, but it led to 2015 Toronto. An Italian farce of relatively recent vintage has arrived on the city’s stage, ruthlessly remodelled to tell a story of here and now.
Accidental Death of an Anarchist is the work of Dario Fo, veteran practitioner of a style that might be called commedia dell’agitprop. (And I do mean veteran; if Soulpepper’s program and my arithmetic are accurate, Fo is still writing and performing in the old country at the age of 89.) This play was inspired, or perhaps provoked, by the death in Milanese police custody of an admitted anarchist suspected of massacre by arson. During his interrogation he mysteriously fell out of a fourth-floor window. His death was declared to be suicide, and the policemen concerned walked away unindicted. Ring any bells?
In Soulpepper’s production they ring loud if not always clear. Ravi Jain, directing, and Paula Wing, dramaturging, have recast Fo’s carabinieri as Canadian cops, apparently graduated from a police acad- emy with ancestral ties to Keystone; some are less corrupt or incompetent than others, but all are manic. The one male civilian present outdoes them all in that respect, but the difference is that he does it on purpose. He’s known as the Madman, and he’s been brought in on a charge of Compulsive Imitation; he keeps pretending to be other people. Left alone, he chances on the files from a suspicious case of Anarchist Defenestration; pos- ing as an investigating judge, he’s able to get the station’s senior brass to confess. Then, by offering to get them out of the pit he’s dug for them, he has them digging it even deeper.
Some of the physical comedy in Jain’s production is inspired, especially an extended acrobatic sequence built on the possibility of the top cops hurling themselves out of the window. They’re subsequently induced to sing a rousing chorus of a revolutionary anthem, and that’s funny, too, though turning it into an audience singalong smacks of excess anxiety, and not just on the characters’ part.
Kawa Ada as the Madman gives something of a virtuoso performance, but only something. The role of this compulsive chameleon calls for the quick-change vocal gymnastics of a Robin Williams plus the wisecracking smarts of a Groucho Marx, which is a tall double order; Ada fills it with tremendous pace, but the speed of his transitions, especially in his early scenes, too often obscures what they’re transitioning to. That goes, too, for the production as a whole; it’s so intent on tying the actors in knots, vocal and physical, that we lose sight of what the facts of the case might actually be.
That’s part of a larger problem. Fo based his play closely on actual recent events; that gave it its kick. This adaptation tries for something similar, but though Canada, like the U.S., has certainly had its recent share of suspect police activity, it hasn’t had a specific incident quite like this one. So it all seems frivolous; and it isn’t made any less so by a continuous stream of jokey local references.
To redress the balance Ada, near the end of the show, steps out of character and lectures us on how the media feed us minor scandals to keep our minds off major ones. The break of convention has a momentary shock impact but, apart from being factually dubious it devalues the rest of the play. Are the “accidental death” and its cover-up also of minor importance? If not, why not? If so, why have we been bothered?
The production is so intent on tying the actors in knots we lose the case