Bene, Carmelo 1937-2002

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Bene, Carmelo 1937-2002

PERSONAL:

Born September 1, 1937, in Campi Salentini, Italy; died of heart-related problems (some sources cite cause of death as cancer), March 16, 2002, in Rome Italy; father, a tobacco factory owner; married; wife's name Raffaella; children: Salome. Education: University of Rome, graduate of Academy of Dramatic Art, 1959.

CAREER:

Actor, playwright, theatrical producer, and director. Made stage acting debut in Caligula, Teatro della Arti, Rome, Italy, 1959; opened a theater in Rome, Italy, 1962; Venice Festival, Venice, Italy, director of theater division, 1984-90. Actor in about a dozen films, including film versions of stage productions, such as Edipo re, 1967; Lo Scatenato, 1967; (also director) Nostra signora dei turchi, 1968; Colpo rovente, actor, 1969; (also director) Capricci, 1969; (also director) Don Giovanni, 1970; Tre nel mille, 1970; (also director and producer) Salome, 1972; (also director, costume designer, and composer) Un Amleto di meno, 1973; and Claro, 1975; guest on Italian television programs. Also performer, with others, for the sound recording Manfred, Fonit Cetra, Italy, 1980.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Venice Film Festival Award, 1968, for Nostra signora dei Turchi.

WRITINGS:

Christo 63 (play), produced in Rome, Italy, 1963.

Pinocchio, Manon, e proposte per il teatro (play), Lerici (Milan, Italy), 1964.

Nostra signora dei Turchi (novel; title means "Our Lady of the Turks"), Sugar (Milan, Italy), 1966, adapted for the stage by Bene and produced in Rome, Italy, 1966.

Credito italiano, V.E.R.D.I., Sugar (Milan, Italy), 1967.

(With others) Król Edyp (screenplay; title means "Oedipus the King"), CWF, 1967, published as Edipo re, Facets (Chicago, IL), 1980.

Capricci (play), 1969.

L'orecchio mancante, Feltrinelli (Milan, Italy), 1970.

Don Giovanni (play), 1970.

Un Amleto di meno, (play), produced in Rome, Italy, 1973.

A boccaperta, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1976.

(With Gilles Deleuze) Sovrapposizioni, Feltrinelli (Milan, Italy), 1978.

Il rosa e il nero, M.L. Giusti (Florence, Italy), 1979.

Pinocchio (play), M.L. Giusti (Florence, Italy), 1979.

Otello, o, La deficienza della donna, Feltrinelli (Milan, Italy), 1981.

La voce di Narciso, Il Saggiatore (Milan, Italy), 1982.

Sono apparso alla Madonna: vie d'(h)eros(es) (autobiography; title means "I Appeared to the Madonna"), Longanesi (Milan, Italy), 1983.

(With Giuseppe Di Leva) L'Adelchi, o, Della volgarità del politico, Longanesi (Milan, Italy), 1984.

(With Dario Ventimiglia) La ricerca impossible: Biennale teatro '89, Marsilio edition (Venice, Italy), 1990.

(With others) Salomé (play), Video Club Luce (Rome, Italy), 1994.

Opere: con l'autografia di un ritratto, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1995.

(With Gilles Deleuze and Osamu Eguchi) Jugo, Hosei Daigaku Shuppankyoku (Tokyo, Japan), 1996.

Discorso su due piedi: il calico, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1998.

(With Giancarlo Dotto) Vita di Carmelo Bene, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1998.

‘I mal de’ fiori: poema, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 2000.

(With Umberto Artioli) Un dio assente: monologo a due voci sul teatro, Medusa (Milan, Italy), 2006.

Also author of screenplay adaptations and television scripts, often based on his own writings for the stage.

SIDELIGHTS:

Carmelo Bene was one of Italy's foremost avant-garde theatrical directors of the late twentieth century. Though he himself disliked the term "avant-garde," his work was always cutting-edge and adventurous. He thought of himself as a "guitto," or barnstormer, parodying the Italian acting tradition.

Bene was born in a small town near Lecce in the south of Italy and was the son of a tobacco factory owner. He showed early promise as a singer, with a beautiful tenor voice, and began to take singing lessons. He unfortunately ruined his vocal chords with incessant smoking and had to abandon this pursuit.

After finishing school, he moved to Rome, where he studied law at the University of Rome; he also attended the Academy of Dramatic Art, where he became fascinated with Caligula by Albert Camus. He heard that Camus would be in Venice and traveled there to meet the famous man. Camus was so impressed with young Bene that he granted him the rights to perform Caligula in Italy, and Bene made his theatrical debut in the title role in 1959 at the Teatro della Arti in Rome; the play was a popular and critical success.

Encouraged by this triumph, Bene began to shock the rather conservative Italian theatrical establishment with unconventional and provocative productions of the classics. Some critics loved his work and others hated it, but soon all Italy was talking about Bene's productions. In 1962, he opened a small basement theater in Rome's Trastevere quarter, where he proceeded to turn a number of classic plays into wild romps. Many of his earliest pieces did not come from pre-existing texts, although he did produce a number of plays based on English classics, particularly Elizabethan and nineteenth-century symbolist works. His productions include a version of Pinocchio in a "phallic key," Hamlet, Edward II by Christopher Marlowe, Salomé, Manon, Il rosa e il nero (based on a novel by "Monk" Lewis), and Don Quixote. He also produced one of his own plays, Nostra signora dei Turchi, based on a novel he had written.

Bene gained a reputation for wild, unpredictable behavior; he urinated on the spectators at one performance, and at another, annoyed by an unresponsive audience, he had all the doors to the theater locked and then he himself left the building. His 1963 piece Christo 63 was declared blasphemous, and he had to close the production almost as soon as he opened it. He used set and lighting to create a barrier between the play and the audience, and sometimes used sound effects that made it difficult for the audience to hear the dialogue. He would modify his scripts extensively, reordering or removing sequences, repeating scenes, and dividing or eliminating characters. The audience was forced to concentrate on theater rather than text, finding a performance's meaning strictly on the basis of theatrical elements. For the production of Nostra signora dei Turchi, he placed the actors behind a screen of colored glass; not only was it nearly impossible for the audience to hear anything they said, the window forced them into the role of Peeping Toms, straining to see the action obscured behind the glass.

Between 1966 and 1973, Bene took an extended absence from the stage. When he returned, the first production he enacted was Nostra signora dei Turchi, the play with which he had ended his first theatrical period. From 1975 to 1983, he enacted plays by Shakespeare, including Amleto, Romeo e Giulietta, Riccardo III, Otello, and Macbeth. In 1982 he produced another version of Pinocchio. His productions continued to be radical and original. As an actor, he would visit all the possible roles that could be created, refusing to stick to one interpretation of a character. His staging was notable for its temporary quality; he was reluctant to commit to a story or a role.

Bene approached Shakespeare's work with a combination of contempt and love. He believed that Shakespeare was writing for an audience of kings and despots, complicit with the power of the state. Still, in Shakespeare Bene found the impossibility of representation; moments constantly had to be recreated in the moment. This fit in well with his belief in the impermanence of theater: that whatever happens on stage is immediately finished forever. He did not work toward a goal; he believed that theater could precipitate a crisis, but only for a moment. He also refused to believe that theater could do any meaningful political work, and he himself never presented a specific political agenda in his work.

Hamlet was one of Bene's favorite plays to enact, and he produced five different stage versions of it over the years. For Amleto, he decoded the character of Hamlet through the ideas of Freud, Oedipus Rex, Lacan, and Laforgue. He portrayed the text symbolically and literally, scanning the pages of the script on stage and ripping some of them out. In 1988, he put on a production titled Omelette. In his versions of Hamlet, he created a confusion of roles and a chaos of texts. He would appear on the stage as Hamlet, but also as director and set designer.

Many of Bene's interpretations of traditional plays were radical and shocking. In his 1984 version of Macbeth, he did away with all of Shakespeare's settings and set the play in a vacuum, in no particular place and at no particular time. He altered or deleted lines, and eliminated the witches, Malcolm, Donalbain, and most minor characters. In Macbeth's dagger speech, the title character held the knife between his legs and caressed it while he spoke. Bene's Romeo e Giulietta used a set so big that it dwarfed the actors. He claimed that the stage setting had to precede the written text. He also claimed that direct communication did not occur between the actors and the audience; the actors were not communicating to one another in dialogue but merely speaking a series of isolated monologues, the actors speaking only to themselves. In addition, Bene did not see the people (i.e., the proletariat) as having any ability to understand his work, and rejected "the worker." He also failed to grant women any sense of individuality in his theatrical treatment of them, which earned him some criticism from feminists.

The 1979 performance of Otello came across more as a presentation of a musical score than as a dramatic play. Each scene and character was introduced by a musical phrase from Gustav Mahler. Bene strove to make this play a presentation of theater as non-representation; the characters mocked the melodrama of Shakespeare's story of love and betrayal rather than enacting it. Characters spoke the lines intended for other characters; Iago wished to transform himself into Othello, and at the end of the play killed the character Emilia as Othello was supposed to do to Desdemona. The play turned into a struggle between Othello and Iago; other characters ceased for a time to speak for themselves, lip-synching instead to the recorded voices of the two main characters. At times, Bene watched scenes as if he were a member of the audience. This production was very well received by both Italian and French critics.

Bene's production of Lorenzaccio in 1986 was based on an original romantic tragedy by Alfred de Musset written in 1834. The play debuted in Florence and then toured Italy. It was set in the time of the Medici in the Renaissance; the plot concerned Lorenzo de Medici's efforts to depose and kill his uncle, Duke Alessandro. These events did not take place on stage; instead, Bene narrated them himself. He did not use the text of Musset's play but rather based his narration on contemporary accounts of the historical events. He cut the play down from its normal three-hour playing time to a mere fifty minutes. Bene used characters and staging to explore contrasting concepts: male and female, white and black, and through it all the nature of historical texts.

Bene intended for his theater to be discursive, to be discussed only as theater and not as another literary or artistic form. He based some of his style on that of bombastic showmen of the nineteenth century, including that of the Englishman Sir Henry Irving. He built his action upon the director, actors, and author. His work was original enough that it is in fact quite difficult to translate or discuss; although he was widely proclaimed a visionary in his native Italy, his reputation has not traveled far in the rest of the world. In fact, many of his Italian critics found his work incomprehensible, though that did not prevent them from declaring him a visionary.

Bene also made a number of films. His first movie role was Creon in Pier Paolo Pasolini's production of Oedipus Rex in 1967. He made a number of film versions of his stage productions. He won a prize at the Venice Film Festival for Nostra signora dei Turchi. This film was inspired by childhood memories of Otranto, a port near his hometown; it told the story of August 1480, when the Turkish fleet invaded and killed 800 people. His most famous film work, a film version of Manzoni's Adelchi, was later aired on Italian television.

In addition to films and plays, Bene also wrote a number of books. Sono apparso alla Madonna: vie d'(h)eros(es) is an autobiography; it deals with a range of religious feelings and artistic projects. He also wrote another autobiography and several novels, as well as a number of works on theater and cinema.

Bene seemed to soften toward the end of his career and to become a more-or-less respectable member of the establishment. Audiences at the end of the century saw him as almost an institutional figure and welcomed him to Rome's Argentina theater for the Christmas 1999 production of Pinocchio, which combined his trademark teasing with brilliant modern technology. He served for many years as director of the theater division of the Venice festival. In 1994, he appeared as the sole guest on a popular Italian talk show and held his own admirably through two hours of questions. He spent the last years of his life afflicted by many ailments and had four heart bypass operations in the late 1980s, followed by another one in 2000. He died in Rome of heart problems in 2002 at the age of sixty-four. Italy's president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi wrote a letter to Bene's family, calling him an "extraordinary dramatic talent" who was "provocative and constantly searching for modes of expression."