In both Accidental Death of an Anarchist and One for the Road, Dario Fo and Harold Pinter respectively orient their stories around violent actions that are never actually witnessed on the stage. Pinter described One for the Road as bordering on agitprop and, indeed, the brutal but vague examination of an interrogation is a disturbingly accurate portrayal of government-sanctioned torture. Given the violent nature of the story Pinter creates, the script could easily call for gratuitous amounts of disturbing and gory onstage interactions between Nicolas and the family he is interrogating. However, Pinter manages to prevent his play from becoming a social commentary steeped in spectacle, allowing violence and brutality, the driving forces of the plot, to exist on stage only through implication. Pinter, whose performances often focus on overtly political commentary on issues such as government oppression or human rights violations, understands that creating a performance with liberal uses of violence on stage has the potential to obscure the overall meaning of his work . truly performed actions such as the Gila rape for the entire audience to see, their attention would be drawn to the spectacle of the moment rather than the underlying social criticism that such action is intended to embody. Rather, the audience is only informed that Gila was raped when Nicolas asks her “my soldier raped you…how many times were you raped?” (page 70-71). Likewise, Nicky's death is communicated to the audience, and indeed, to Gila and Victor, only by Nicolas's use of the past tense when he says, “Your son. I wouldn't worry about him. He was a little asshole." (p. 79) Rather......middle of paper......-finished. Although she appears to allow the officers to die, Manaic comments that this would not be seen as an appropriate ending in the eyes of the "critics", and thus frees them Perhaps ironically, as soon as the police officers are freed, they realize that Maria knows enough information to incriminate them and, therefore, handcuff her to the desk and sentence her to prison. death In this sense, it is Maria's avoidance of violence that ultimately seals her fate. In this final exchange, Fo restates his question of whether violence should be used as a method of enforcing morality. audience the complexity of that decision. The Maniac comments, "some questions simply cannot be resolved gradually," can be seen as Fo's final request to the audience to consider the overall question of the work entirely (p.. 74).