Actor Daniel Rigby: ‘You just want to throw your hands in the air and say, “This is ludicrous!”’

“I’ve always just loved falling over and bashing my head off stuff,” says actor Daniel Rigby. Which is fortunate, because he’s going to be doing a lot of it.

Rigby plays the Maniac in Accidental Death of an Anarchist — a dazzling comic performance that he’s about to reprise in London’s West End following glowing reviews in Sheffield and at the Lyric Hammersmith. The 1970 farce by Italian playwrights and activists Dario Fo and Franca Rame is based on a real-life scandal: the suspicious death during police interrogation of an Italian railway worker and anarchist.

Rigby’s character, a wildly unpredictable agent of mischief, turns up with a bag of disguises, a ton of confidence and the energy of a tornado. In the guise of a visiting judge investigating the “mishap”, he proceeds to turn the police and their cover story inside out.

Tom Basden’s riotous new version of the script fields two secret weapons. First, he and director Daniel Raggett, bring the satire right up to date, loading it with acerbic references to the multiple scandals and calamities besetting the Metropolitan Police and UK government: dodgy WhatsApp messages; missing paperwork; sudden bouts of amnesia; frantic revisions . . . 

Second, they deploy Rigby. The actor turns in a performance of such breathtaking energy that by the interval even the audience needs a little lie-down. “The demands of it physically on the body and on the mouth are considerable,” says Rigby, an altogether calmer individual in person. So what does he have for breakfast? “A simple bowl of Coco Pops,” he replies, grinning.

The Maniac shares qualities with other outside agents who walk into a situation and expose what’s going on: Inspector Goole in JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls; the “government inspector” in Gogol’s comedy of the same name. But Fo’s maverick interloper also brings a degree of metatheatrical mischief. He enjoys a completely different relationship with the audience to any other character in the farce — flirting, breaking the fourth wall, freewheeling from one comic style to another.

Rigby’s previous roles have included the frightfully earnest wannabe actor Alan Dangle in the National Theatre’s One Man, Two Guv’nors and the equally hapless thespian Garry Lejeune in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. He won a Bafta for his portrayal of comedian Eric Morecambe in the BBC’s Eric and Ernie. He has also played serious roles and done stand-up comedy. But the Maniac, he reckons, is out there on his own.

“One of the things the character is doing is seeing how far he can push it,” he says. “Normally with stage comedy you are investing in a character and trying to understand where that character is coming from. This feels more like a hybrid . . . I’ve not given him a name; there’s no biography. He’s a transposition of the Harlequin clown, who embodies a spirit of chaos and mischief. So I don’t think of him in terms of a real person. I think of him as a Bugs Bunny character. The disrupter.”

Disrupter could be a pretty good description of Fo himself. A bitingly satirical, often controversial artist, he allied radical political commitment with a wicked sense of humour, combining agitprop with elements of traditional commedia dell’arte. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997 for work that “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”.

It would be pleasing to report that a play about police malpractice and political smokescreens written in 1970 felt out of date. In fact, the question for political farce today is whether it can compete with real life. When the team first staged this production in September of last year, Liz Truss was in power, trying to outlast a lettuce. Since then we’ve had one politician advising hard-pressed families not to aspire to eating a cheese sandwich and another reminiscing about swimming in sewage as a lad, plus a political saga about a locked phone that Fo might have blushed to include. Indeed, if Lady Heather Hallett tires of the UK government’s reluctance to hand over material to its own Covid inquiry, she could always send in Rigby with a suitcase of wigs and a sharp stare to get things moving.

The frequently absurd churn of events in public life is what makes the show a “legitimate response”, says Rigby: “You just want to throw your hands in the air and say, ‘This is ludicrous!’ There’s claiming a bit of power and agency back in just laughing at it all.”

But can laughing achieve anything practical, other than making us feel better? Rigby points out that Fo’s original comedy is driven by a powerful sense of rage, and that Basden and Raggett have sought to replicate that. A statistic emblazoned on the set at the end of the show informs us of the number of people who have died in police custody, or following contact with the police, in England and Wales since 1990. “The hope is that the kernel of anger, which is at the core of the play, is something the audience comes away with.”

Before studying at Rada, Rigby cut his teeth playing pantomime dames in amateur dramatics. His earliest experience of stand-up, however, was not encouraging. While appearing in a show at Nottingham Playhouse, he entered an open-mic “gong night” at a local pub, where the audience, armed with voting cards, chose which would-be comedians got booed off the stage.

“I was so nervous, I couldn’t look at them,” he recalls. “I just looked at my shoes. I could barely speak. And when you’re that nervous in front of an audience, it’s not even that they want to heckle or anything, they just want it to be over for you. The atmosphere completely vacuumed out of the room. Before I could even get the first vote, I terminated my own gig by walking off stage.”

Fortunately, he did not run away and book a flight to the other side of the world. “I remember thinking, ‘If I don’t get back on the stage right now, I will never ever try this again.’” He did get back on stage and not only got through the gig but went on to win that evening — he laughs about it now. Even so, the horror scarcely bears contemplation. So what is it about comedy that keeps bringing him back to bounce off the furniture?

He hesitates. “Oh, I’m going to sound pretentious,” he groans. “But I think there’s something kind of beautiful about humans getting together and laughing together at something shared. A bunch of higher primates for a moment forgetting that they’re going to die.”

At the Theatre Royal Haymarket, June 12-September 9, anarchistwestend.com