When Tom Basden was first approached to adapt Accidental Death Of An Anarchist almost ten years ago, there was a small problem. He’d long been a fan of this angry and important play that also happens to be very funny, but something was making him anxious.
When first staged in Italy more than half a century ago, Dario Fo’s play had audiences who knew immediately what the playwright was satirising. The story is based on a real-life case in 1969 when an anarchist fell to his death from the window of a Milan police station. It was still raw at the time and people were enraged and probably frightened.
Writing any sort of satire when you feel the need to devote time to describing the rotten power system you’re artfully sending up is almost impossible. But, blimey, that’s all changed over the past few years, thanks to the recent increase in exposures of institutional corruption and abuses of power within certain police organisations. Now, audiences in this country know who the satirical targets are and, if they’ve been paying attention to the news, they’ll be angry, too.
‘I feel like this is the right time for this,’ says Tom, best known to many for writing and performing in Plebs and Here We Go, as well as starring in Ricky Gervais’s After Life. ‘It’s right that it’s taken this long because, finally, this is a moment when we can put this story in front of people and we don’t have to explain it. We don’t have to explain why it’s serious, what the police have been doing and why we’re angry about it. Everybody knows and everyone’s energised by the story and demanding that things are done differently.’
When his version of Anarchist was first put on this year – at the Lyric in Hammersmith and the Crucible in Sheffield – he’d already adapted it to make it ‘feel fresh and immediate’. It still looks at the Milan case and contains the brilliant material from the original play, but Tom wanted to set it all in London to root it within a world that audiences could more easily recognise. This brings to the fore not only problems with the police that we’re becoming more aware of, but those happening in the world around us.
Now that the play, which stars Tony Gardner and Bafta winner Daniel Rigby, is transferring to London’s West End, Tom has been making even more updates. ‘It’s not just about the topicality – it’s also about cultural ideas and trends,’ he says. ‘Comedy dates very quickly. To recreate what was funny about something, particularly something that’s 50-odd years old, you do have to reimagine a fair bit of it, otherwise it becomes a museum piece. I was very keen, weirdly, to honour the original as best I could by changing it quite a lot.’
