Flawless: Accidental Death of an Anarchist, at the Lyric Hammersmith, reviewed

Accidental Death of an Anarchist has been performed all over the world with varying degrees of success. Written by Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame, the script was inspired by an actual case of police brutality in 1969 when a train driver with anarchist leanings was found dead beneath the open window of a fourth-floor interrogation room. Official reports described the fatality as ‘accidental’. The plot structure is borrowed from Gogol’s The Government Inspector. A senior civil servant arrives in an isolated town and exposes the corrupt and self-serving ways of the townsfolk. After he departs, the civil servant is exposed as an imposter.

Here, the authority figure is a mercurial exhibitionist, the Maniac, whom we first meet during a police interview. He describes himself as a born diva, a luvvie-from-hell, a non-stop performer who treats all human interactions like an improvised sketch show. His business card, he tells the cops, is a dramatic script which falsely claims that he graduated from Cambridge, but this untruth is permissible to anyone who accepts that business cards are works of fiction. His zany sophistries are faultlessly logical. The Maniac learns that a suspicious death in custody is about to be investigated by a judge so he disguises himself as a leading member of the judiciary and starts to interrogate the police. But because he loves fiction, he encourages them to embellish and falsify their testimony. Which they do with relish. By treating the cover-up as an act of mischief rather than a shameful crime the script maintains its playful atmosphere and never descends into self-righteous homily. It’s a superb feat of writing by Tom Basden who adapted and updated the original text.