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PARTISAN REVIEW
a Milan precinct station. We now know, and Fo suspected as much
when his collective first performed the play, that the anarchist,
Giuseppe Pinelli, was pushed to his death by the police.
The subject may not sound like promising material for a farce,
but Fo turned it into a political satire that was extremely topical
when it opened. In a preface to the play, Fo calls it "an exercise in
counterinformation." He notes that all references to the death are
based on authentic documents - transcripts of investigations carried
out by judges as well as police reports. Now that the case is over a
decade old and Pinelli's innocence has been proven, the facts are not
so urgent or controversial. However, the play still functions as a
complex, comic statement on state secrecy and abuse of power.
While it was once a political act, a rallying point for opponents of
state repression, and was seen as such by over half a million Italians,
Fo's play remains popular in other countries because it suggests that
forms of law and power are based on controlled information - state
secrets which lose force once they are revealed, shared, and conse–
quently "democratized."
The play's central character, a maniacal buffoon originally
acted by Fo himself, parodies the state's control of information by
pretending to be a high court judge. He is the epitome of a
"documentary clown," turning state evidence around, so it testifies
against the state. In his disguise, the buffoon encourages police of–
ficers to compose their alibi against accusations that they murdered
Pinelli. In 1970 the state issued different reports that contradicted one
another and offered specious conclusions, thereby inadvertently ex–
posing its manipulative control of information . Parodying this pro–
cess to expose it more fully, Fo juxtaposes the contradictions of dif–
ferent official reports for comic effect.
By impersonating different authorities, using different alibis,
encouraging the policemen to speak lines and lies he gives them,
confusing them so they don't know which thoughts are theirs and
which are the impostor judge's, Fo literally turns the police alibis
about the murder into charades . In doing this he intimates that state
power itself may be one long series of charades, cover-ups, and
manipulations of facts that abusive power requires for its perpetua–
tion.
The capacity of Fo's buffoon to impersonate policemen, anar–
chists, judge, and bishop fosters a comic, carnivalesque vision of
society where, as Bakhtin said of the carnival in Rabelais's world,
