The enfant terrible of Italian stage and screen, actor-director-writer Carmelo Bene, who has died aged 64, shared the distinction with Dario Fo of being a theatrical artist who also became a literary phenomenon. Though most of his writings were for the theatre and cinema, he also published several novels and two autobiographies - one in 1983 entitled, somewhat brazenly, Sono Apparso Alla Madonna (I Appeared To The Madonna).
Eccentric and gifted, Bene was undoubtedly the greatest guitto (barnstormer) of the contemporary Italian stage - a term that he relished. He succeeded in parodying the Italian histrionic acting tradition, as well as being its apotheosis. In the theatre his model was Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, while the moderns he respected most in literature and painting were Joyce and Francis Bacon. In the cinema he had little sympathy for film-making after Buster Keaton and Eisenstein, though he once confessed to liking Godard's Pierrot Le Fou.
Bene was born at Campi Salentina, just north of Lecce, a city where baroque architecture sits side by side with religious kitsch. A precocious, narcissistic temperament led him towards the acting profession, but he did not last long at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome.
Instead, with a director friend he set up a company and they succeeded in convincing Albert Camus to give them the rights (without payment) to Caligula. The production opened in Rome in 1959, and Carmelo shone in the title role. The next year he restaged Caligula himself, moving closer to his future iconoclastic style.
He soon became a subject for scandal when, at a small cellar theatre club in Rome, the police stopped the performances of his "play", Christ '63, and accused those involved of obscenity, the Church's pretext for halting anything smelling of blasphemy.
From then onwards, though his revolution was more aesthetic than political, he was adopted as a cause by the militant dissenters of the 60s. Even so, only a handful of critics understood his work, and audiences were small. Among his first, and most memorable, productions were disarmingly anachronistic versions of Manon Lescaut and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, as well as very personal interpretations of Pinocchio and Hamlet, a text that he repeatedly returned to.
His Hamlet was more inspired by the French surrealist poet Jules Laforgue than by Shakespeare, and he was to do five different versions of it on stage, plus a film feature in 1973, Un Amleto di Meno (One Hamlet Less), and a definitively ironical version in 1987, which he called Hommelette For Hamlet.
Bene made five cinema features between 1968 and 1973, the most notable of which was the first, based on his novel and play Nostra Signora Dei Turchi (Our Lady Of The Turks), inspired by his childhood memories of Otranto, the port south of Lecce. On stage, and also on screen, he created a phantasmagorical kaleidoscope of sound and colour, expressing a nightmare vision of what happened in August 1480 when the Turkish fleet invaded Otranto and massacred 800 of the inhabitants. It was a remarkable example of avant-garde cinema, even if the Sight and Sound critic reported that "it made no sense whatever".
Bene won his most deserved accolades from Italian and French critics in 1979 with a sumptuously staged and passionately declaimed version of Othello. That same year he also did a memorable concert performance of Byron's Manfred with Schumann's music, first at La Scala and then on a summer night in the ruins of Rome's Basilica of Maxentius. In this, as in his many poetry concerts, he proved that when well supported by electronics, the human voice could be "played" like a musical instrument.
Afflicted with almost every illness in the medical books, and obliged to have four by-pass operations in the late 1980s (repeated in 2000), he reappeared in public in 1994 as the sole guest of Italian commercial TV's most popular late-night talk show. He held his own for two hours against the onslaught of a sceptical but bemused audience.
On returning to the stage, he was given almost institutional recognition. He was even the Christmas attraction in December 1999 at Rome's major theatre, the Argentina, with a new version of Pinocchio, which combined the charm of the old teasing Carmelo with the brilliance of modern technology.
He leaves his wife Raffaella and daughter Salome.
Carmelo Bene, actor, director and writer, born September 1 1937; died March 16 2002 |
