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Magic Lantern's Page on
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Dario Fo is Italy's leading contemporary playwright, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling and radical comic satires. Dario Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997.
The power of the play derives from the tension that the playwright deliberately sets up between the comedy arising from confusions of identity and the tragic circumstances surrounding the death of an innocent man. It is Dario Fo's firm belief that laughter opens people's minds and makes them receptive to ideas that they might otherwise reject. In keeping with this, the play is replete with funny situations and characters guaranteed to cause a laugh riot. CAST: Hans Kaushik, Yog Japee, Asim Sharma, Paul Mathew, Sriya Chari and Jagan. Direction: Rajiv Krishnan a Magic Lantern Production With the support of The Alliance Francaise de Chennai. For more details, contact: Rajiv, 824 0558 / 432 2894 or email saxmanhans@yahoo.co.uk
Excerpt from the review in The Hindu, 14 July 2000: Enemy of the status quoELIZABETH ROY reviews a play which used English in a
framework thoroughly local - the tone, the feelings and the nuances.
WHEN DARIO FO won the Nobel Prize it was hoped that the legacy would make
people celebrate theatre as a live art form and that the liveliness would have
them responding in a collective way. `Accidental Death of an Anarchist', which
he wrote in 1971 is an exciting play in that sense.
``Accidental Death...'' is based on the bomb blast in Milan - the worst in a
series staged by the right wing extremists in the intelligence services to
discredit the Italian Communist Party. The police went into action rounding up
anarchists (most of them pacifists!!). During interrogation an anarchist was
thrown out of the window and died on the pavement below. The police reported it
as an accidental fall and subsequent death. Reports were written and there were
cover-ups and re-cover-ups, which led to public outrage.
In the play, a medieval style Maniac runs amuck in the police station where
the anarchist had been murdered. He plays ``the theatre of the real'' and
impersonating a judge conducting an inquiry, he tricks the police into
re-opening the case. The layers of cover-ups are peeled away till the naked
truth stares the audience in the face (In medieval times, itinerant performers
were the voices of the oppressed people. Fo tries to bring these voices to life
in the contemporary context). Review in full available at: http://www.the-hindu.com/2000/07/14/stories/0914035b.htm Excerpts from the Chennai Theatre Newsletter # 17 Review: ... A very pan-Indian adaptation of Fo's classic social satire
that spares the governmental, judicial and legal machineries none too kindly,
the production was worth watching going by the amount of curiosity Magic Lantern
and the show's director Rajiv Krishnan had generated among the theatre-going
public. Interesting too were some of the approaches to this production,
which tried to change the face of theatre in english as practised by Chennai's
english theatre practitioners. It may have attempted to break the mindset of the
english theatre-goers who expect a certain English-ness to an english theatre
production, through their use of dialectical Indian Englishes, vernacular film
songs that had stirred many a Tamil heart to swings of political and vote-bank
sentiments and total localisation of the plot (which invariably happens in all
of the productions of Fo's plays internationally). But what
could have been avoided were the depths to which the physicalisation of humour
plummetted, bringing to mind some of the so-called comedy acting that one
excruciatingly experiences when one watches Tamil films. |
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