Sharply topical satire on police brutality

Accidental Death of an Anarchist

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1

★★★★★

Producers are taking a punt bringing into the West End this niftily contemporary version of Dario Fo’s time-honoured satire on police corruption and criminality written by comedian Tom Basden (a well-known face from Ricky Gervais’s After Life) and directed by Daniel Raggett. It’s hardly an easy sell amid the summer languor. That’s an affirmation of their faith in the topicality and verve of his update, which nods to everything from police WhatsApp groups to diversity training and Magic Mike. Equally, it attests to a desire for us to bear witness to Daniel Rigby’s unbridled comic brio.

The central role of the “Maniac”, a consummate oddball who improvises a DIY investigation into the fatal defenestration of an interrogated suspect by adopting a series of brazen disguises in a police HQ, represents a gift of a part – initially tailored to the Italian actor-author himself.

Staged around the world since its 1970 premiere, with adaptation built into its DNA, notable previous “madmen” have included Alan Cumming, Jonathan Pryce and Rhys Ifans. You need performers who can tilt between loose-cannon eccentricity and bogus authority. But also, to make the indictment of police shortcomings hit home locally, actors who can sail over the top and keep going while imparting a recognisable, buttoned-up Britishness.

For this, Rigby is brilliantly suited. His is the kind of face that could go unnoticed in a crowd, almost commuterordinary, yet an early spotlight on his mug yields a conspiratorial Cheshire Cat grin and arrestingly impish gaze. He doesn’t just take Basden’s script by the throat and deliver its needling round of gags with breathless finesse, he exerts a physicality that dominates every inch of the office and beyond. Whether he’s gaily flinging documents into the air or his jacket into the stalls (to disrupt the artifice of the fourth wall), spoofing the doddery decrepitude of the judiciary or executing a slowmotion tumble off a table, his is a perfectly timed, lethally funny satirical sting operation. There’s a high risk that we’ll start to flag before the rising star (with an able supporting cast of five incarnating the self-incriminating coppers) does. But the bluntness of the closing take-down of the Met (“[This] is a police force that cannot, or will not, reform”), which chimes with the damning verdict of the recent Casey report, is no less effective for being obvious. If so much failure can happen in plain sight, what does that say about our institutions – about all of us? Catch it, then, if you can.

Until Sept 9. Tickets: 020 7930 8800; anarchistwestend.com

Unbridled comic brio: Daniel Rigby as the ‘Maniac’