Review of Daniel Rigby in Tom Basden’s new adaptation

‘Timely’ was the adjective most bandied about when it was announced that the new adaptation of Darius Fo’s satirical farce about police brutality, was heading for the West End, opening weeks after Baroness Casey’s report into the toxicity running right through the Met.

Although – as is keenly pointed out in Tom Basden’s updated version of Dario Fo’s darkly comic script – there really hasn’t been a point in the 53 years since this was first performed in Milan that the police haven’t been at the centre of a scandal. How many bad apples do yo need before you think the whole orchard might be cursed?

On stage, the barbed political points are encased in a broad slapstick, carried almost entirely on the shoulders of Daniel Rigby. We first meet him after he’s been been pulled into the police station on a charge of impersonation, against which he pleads insanity since he is afflicted by a debilitating mental condition: the compulsion to be an actor.

And act he does. This is a manic one-man tour-de-force, often disrespectful of the fourth wall, obviously calls to mind James Corden’s second-finest moment in One Man Two Guvnors (after Gavin & Stacey, obviously). But Rigby’s physically active, explosively loquacious, character, called only The Maniac, also has throwbacks to Daffy Duck’s overpowering whirlwind of chaos, combined with the cheekiness of Eric Morecambe, who Rigby memorably played on TV. Plus a few pantomime  laughs and facial expressions as well as slapstick tumbles thrown in for extra measure.

It’s full-on. The volume of the performance is never less than maximum and – in the first half especially - a bit more light and shade would not go amiss. The audience are so bludgeoned by the truncheon of broad, bawdy comedy, that some of Basden’s best lines are drowned out. ‘I don’t know what unconscious bias is - but I bloody hate it,’ says one copper, the irony missed on the audience, just as it is on the detective who snaps it out. 

The setting and the language has been updated to present-day London to allow for such swipes, along with myriad topical references and gags. But the themes are timeless  – even if any subtle points to ponder are drowned out by the noise of Rigby’s performance. To compensate, every so often there’s a bit of unambiguous, earnest soapboxing to drive home the police’s appalling record.

While being grilled by the dogged Inspector Burton (Mark Hadfield)  for the crime of overacting – or more accurately, impersonation, the line is very thin – The Maniac finds out he’s in the same police station that had made  the news after an anarchist suspected of planting a bomb (‘terrorist’ being too loaded a term for a man who is white, it’s archly observed) fell out of a window under suspicious circumstances. The subsequent inquiry – to no one’s surprise – reeked of cover-up.

Sensing the opportunity for more than mischief, our trickster hero then adopts a new disguise of a judge opening up a new inquiry into the suspicious death. He appears to be on the coppers’ side, doing far more than leading his simple witnesses/straightmen – Tony Gardner as the nonplussed superintendent, Tom Andrews as the pitbull detective and Ro Kumar as the sidelined PC –to concoct an elaborate and increasingly implausible explanation to the defenestration. 

After the break he becomes a forensic detective – with wonderfully comic false arm – to ‘accidentally’ help a visiting journalist (Fi Phelan), toward the truth. Basden here ladles in criticism of a subservient, lazy media into the overheating satirical soup, too.

Showing just how much of an issue police brutality as become,  Death Of An Anarchist is the second black comedy about the subject space of a few days. The other, The Pillowman, has Steve Pemberton and Paul Kaye as the respectively sarcastic and psychopathic coppers interrogating writer Lily Allen in a much darker, rather uneven production.

 Basden has Rigby ask whether any good will come from the liberal hand-wringing of the tofu-munching wokerati… and the answer is probably not. But there’s still much pointed fun to be had at watching the Maniac scythe through police hubris and proving that the lunatic is the only voice of sanity here. Even so, your senses might want an occasional breather from his relentless intensity.

• The Accidental Death of an Anarchist runs at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until September 9, with tickets priced £18 to £118. Tickets

Review date: 28 Jun 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Theatre Royal Haymarket