SOURCE: "The Performance of Power and the Power of Performance: Rewriting the Police State in Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist," in Modern Drama, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, March 1990, pp. 139-49.

In the following essay, Wing maintains that the form of Accidental Death of an Anarchist reinforces its content. The provisional, ever-changing nature of the play, she argues, demonstrates that the "notion of a single, monolithic, political truth is shown to be as corrupt as the notion of a unified, cohesive, theatrical representation."

Italian playwright Dario Fo has been exploring the radical relationship between power, violence, and comedy for the past forty years.¹ In a wide variety of plays and performance events which feature theatrical techniques culled from the fertile traditions of his homeland, fo weaves comedy's ancient ploys into a complex production mode featuring a type of grotesque physical paradox which he calls "black mime,"² in order...