The Maniac’s Bags Symbol Analysis

The Maniac’s plastic bags, which contain his disguises and secret recording device, represent the political power inherent in acting and the theater. When the Maniac carries them into Bertozzo’s office at the beginning of the play, they probably won’t attract the audience’s attention. But when he pulls a judge costume out of them at the end of the first scene, and then a tape recorder at the beginning of the second, it becomes clear that the props in his bags are the secret to his power: they enable him to become anyone at any time, fool the people who surround him, and record evidence of the police’s crimes. They prove that he isn’t just an errant madman having fun at the police’s expense. Rather, even if his exact goals aren’t evident until the end of the play, the bags show that he has clearly planned out his mission beforehand—and that, as the audience should realize, so has Dario Fo.

In fact, just as the Maniac secretly records the policemen’s lies and accusations from his unassuming bag full of ridiculous tricks, Fo tries to use a satirical play full of ridiculous jokes to pinpoint the uncomfortable truth about the police’s complicity in the real-life Piazza Fontana bombing and the real anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli’s death. The Maniac uses fiction and disguise to expose the police’s cover-ups and corruption, while Fo uses his Maniac—and all the other tools available to him in the theater—to give the policemen responsible for Giuseppe Pinelli’s death the kind of public trial that he knew the justice system would not give them in the foreseeable future.