The Anomalous Bicephalus

 At various times during the Trump presidency, I fantasized about famous plays that should be re-staged for the contemporary era, with costuming and set-pieces redesigned (plus maybe a few key names and lines of dialogue altered) so as to make an implicit commentary on political events. Most of my picks had probably occurred to others: a rendering of Richard III, with the increasingly despotic and isolated central character cast in the image of Trump himself, and the various henchmen whom he betrays and executes bearing the names of former members of the administration whom Trump had cast out; Ionesco's Rhinoceros reimagined to refer to the contagion of Republican election denialism, or perhaps to the more literally infectious spread of COVID-19 under Trump's insouciant watch... and so on. 

But all of that was before I learned of a play by Dario Fo that requires even less re-envisioning to establish its contemporary relevance. For it turns out that Fo--the Nobel Prize-winning playwright best known for his political farce the Accidental Death of an Anarchist--was also the creator of a forgotten 2003 work that features both Vladimir Putin (twenty years younger then, but just as vicious), as well as a bombastic, thin-skinned, right-wing, overly litigious and possibly mobbed-up media figure with an eerie tendency to make excuses for Putin's atrocities. In Fo's case, the thin-skinned politician was Silvio Berlusconi. But there is no reason why a contemporary restaging of the play could not cast him with a spray-on tan. Skin, after all, can be orange as well as thin. 

Given its seeming contemporary relevance, in light of Putin's war of aggression on the world stage as well as Italy's troubling recent electoral flirtation with the far right, I'm surprised this play hasn't reemerged into the cultural conversation, instead of being all-but-forgotten after its 2003 staging. Part of the problem may be its limited availability. It appears never to have been translated formally into English. The Italian text can be found online, however, and I did my best to make sense of it with the help of Google Translate. 

It turned out, upon reading, that the play is even more on-point for our era than I had hypothesized. The Berlusconi character is decidedly Trumpian-- not only in his nativism and Islamophobic populism, but also in his born-autocrat's aversion to all criticism and alternative points of view (Berlusconi, like Trump, is apparently fond of the nuisance lawsuit. In response to Fo's play--in which, as I mentioned, he is portrayed as overly sensitive to satire and prone to retaliatory litigation and attempted censorship, the real-life Berlusconi proceeded to sue the play's creator for a million Euros, thereby proving his point for him.)

But more than any of this, the parallels with the contemporary track record of Putin are chilling. Fo's play opens with a discussion of Putin's brutal war in Chechnya, and more specifically of a bogus "referendum" that Putin had just staged in Grozny, ostensibly proving that the Chechen people voted overwhelmingly to rejoin the Russian Federation (even though votes were cast at gunpoint, in the face of an occupying army). To anyone who has been following recent events in eastern Ukraine, this ought to sound eerily familiar. 

Fo's critique of Berlusconi is that he seemed disturbingly prone to defend Putin's actions (let us keep in mind too that Putin's brutal suppression of the Chechen rebels was applauded in the U.S. at the time as a contribution to the global "war on terror.") In order to make this point in a satirical vein, the conceit of the play (or really the play-within-a-play, according to the nesting-doll structure of Fo's production) is that part of Putin's brain has accidentally been implanted in Berlusconi's head. As a result, the then-Italian prime minister has become the "Two-headed Anomaly" (as it is known in English-language media accounts, though I prefer Google Translate's more colorful rendering: "The Anamalous Bicephalus), occasionally spouting errant Putinisms.

As the odious Donald by all accounts is plotting another run for office after the midterms, and as a second Trump presidency would almost certainly mean less robust support for the Ukrainian defense and more kowtowing to Putin's aggression, what better time could there be to return the "Anomalous Bicephalus" to the stage? It is appalling to think that one Russian leader has been staging false referendums and brutalizing neighboring countries and regions unimpeded for the last twenty years, and that a play written about him in 2003 should read as so timely today, but so it is; and all the more reason to revive this farce for the theater. 

To be sure, the result would not be a uniformly serious and high-minded theater-going experience. Don't let the Nobel Prize fool you. Fo liked to compare himself to a jester, twitting the king for the delight of the groundlings, and much of his play has the broad humor that such an approach implies. There are jokes about Putin wearing a karate costume to bed because it's the only way he can sleep or make love; Fo's own portrayal of Berlusconi featured himself crouching within a trench and kicking up tiny puppet legs to signal movement (get it? Because Berlusconi is short!)

But amidst such absurdity we should remember Brecht's words, at the end of another theatrical satire about the "resistible" rise of a would-be authoritarian. As the lines run in Tabori's translation: If we could learn to look instead of gawking,/We'd see the horror in the heart of farce. For all Fo's clowning and buffoonish antics in the play, there is horror in his satire as well. Just as there would have to be in any treatment of Putin... or of Trump. And laughter remains now what it has always been: one of the most impactful ways of expressing horror... and outrage. If it were not so effective, after all, why would the Berlusconis of the world be so keen to try to sue it out of existence?