The Italian actor Marcello Magni, who has died aged 63 of prostate most cancers, was a co-founder of Complicité (initially referred to as Théâtre de Complicité) in 1983 and remained on the coronary heart of probably the most fascinating and imaginative producing operations in Europe, not to mention the UK.
Like his Complicité colleagues Annabel Arden, Simon McBurney and Jozef Houben, Magni educated in Paris on the college of the mime, masks and bodily theatre knowledgeable Jacques Lecoq, and the strategies acquired there knowledgeable all the corporate’s work over the following 40 years. He was half a step forward of them already, hailing from Bergamo in northern Italy, the house city of the primary, mid-Sixteenth century Arlecchino (Harlequin).
Magni had the innate ability, grace and emotional wit of the improvisatory acrobatic and linguistic inventory gags – lazzi – within the commedia dell’arte that he first displayed in an early present, Arlecchino, on the Battersea Arts Centre, south-west London.
There was, additionally, the nonetheless gravity and eccentricity of Harpo Marx, and certainly of Woody Allen, in his comedian persona, which burst forth in Extra Greater Snacks (1983), a madcap situation that includes 4 weird derelicts devising escape routes from their shabby habitat, as if Ready for Godot was invaded by The Younger Ones.
When this present was reprised in a 1988 four-month residency at Pierre Audi’s Almeida in north London, the theatre world actually woke as much as the Complicité phenomenon, a collaboration with no “technique” or coverage past “turbulent ahead momentum”.
The season’s centrepiece was a revival by Arden and McBurney of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s macabre parable The Go to, by which a provincial city acquires prosperity by conspiring to homicide one among its main residents. This model of the play – super music, swirling motion, comedian characters worthy of Gogol, good scenography – was, mentioned Peter Brook, higher than his personal fabled model starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, in English in 1958 following the play’s premiere in German two years earlier.
The Fontanne function of the world’s richest girl was fantastically taken by Kathryn Hunter in a career-defining efficiency as she joined the corporate and fell in love with Magni. Thereafter, professionally and in personal life, the couple have been inseparable, and in 2011 they married. Different essential artists hooked up to Complicité have been the author/director Neil Bartlett, and the administrators Annie Castledine and Helena Kaut-Howson.
The final of those directed a shocking revival of The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams at Theatr Clwyd in 1995, Hunter’s sex-starved widow joyously renewed by Magni’s clownish Sicilian truck-driver. The couple have been additionally paired in King Lear on the Leicester Haymarket in 1997 (Kaut-Howson directing Hunter as Lear, Magni because the Idiot) and Brecht’s Mom Braveness, directed by Nancy Meckler for Shared Expertise (New Ambassadors, 2000).
Their final look on stage collectively got here in February 2022 because the Outdated Man and Outdated Girl in Ionesco’s The Chairs on the Almeida; that they had invited an enormous crowd (of chairs, it seems) to their round tower to listen to an “essential” message earlier than making separate exits into the river under, the place they drowned. In Ionesco, the orator with the message is speechless; on this model, Toby Sedgwick reeled off a listing of disaster and cataclysm.
Magni was the eldest of three sons of Miranda (nee Calliari), a specialist in artwork remedy for recovering kids, and Corrado Magni, a highway and bridge building surveyor. He was educated on the Liceo Filippo Lussana of Bergamo and, after a yr’s navy service, the College of Bologna, the place he studied literature and philosophy.
Complicité was one of many two key powerhouse fringe firms of the Eighties, the opposite being Cheek By Jowl, which focused on extra canonical classics. Along with his work with Complicité, Magni was drawn, with Hunter, to working with the Royal Shakespeare Firm, and extra considerably, Mark Rylance’s Shakespeare’s Globe.
For the previous, they co-directed the medieval morality play Everyman in 1996; and on the Globe they labored collectively on The Comedy of Errors (1999) – Hunter directing, Magni outstandingly humorous and ingenious as each Dromios – and Pericles (2005). As Hunter mentioned, Magni was a pure for the Globe, sharing with Rylance a particular heat and expertise for embracing that giant enviornment with out seen pressure.
Better of all, although, have been Complicité’s co-productions with Richard Eyre’s Nationwide Theatre, which launched the prose work of two main European surrealists, Bruno Schulz and Daniil Kharms, each involving Magni and Hunter, in stagings of hallucinatory energy and Dostoyevskian, visceral ardour: Avenue of Crocodiles (1992, based mostly on the life and fictions of Schulz) and Out of a Home Walked a Man (1994, based mostly on the writings of Kharms). These exhibits ought to have been bottled and distributed on prescription to audiences down the years.
Brook’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris was a pure magnet for Complicité actors, and lots of lovely works emerged firstly of this century. There Brook directed 5 quick Beckett performs, Fragments, in 2007 – adopted by a world tour – by which Hunter reinvented Rockaby and Magni performed each an optimist and a pessimist in numerous variations of Tough for Theatre 1. In Come and Go, Hunter and Magni have been joined by Houben, three ladies sitting in coats and hats on a park bench, holding arms “within the previous manner”.
And when Magni performed Willie in Beckett’s Blissful Days, usually a distant, silent determine, Brook hailed “a correct actor” as he built-in him extra totally into the play. Different Brook initiatives he graced on the Bouffes have been a controversial, lovely, pared-down A Magic Flute (2010); a portfolio of theoretical writing on theatre by Meyerhold and others, Why? (2019); and eventually a novel double as high-flying Ariel and drunken Stephano in The Tempest (2020), Brook discovering, he mentioned, in Magni’s Ariel – gentle in motion, profound in feeling – “a high quality within the character I’ve been in search of for years” over many productions.
Magni’s display screen work was confined to cameos in a number of movies – Steve Barron’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996), Rob Marshall’s 9 (2009) and a hilarious episode, The Eleventh Hour (2010), within the Matt Smith Physician Who period, because the villainous proprietor of a rabidly vicious canine with whom he merged look and character. The director was satisfied he must use pc graphics, however so astonishing was Magni’s efficiency that the impact was totally achieved and the scene shot in simply two takes.
The actor appeared to have the ability to do something, even converse in Penguinese as an inquisitive Penguin – in addition to a dozen different characters – within the voiceover to the youngsters’s claymation collection Pingu.
Within the final phases of his sickness, Magni returned to Bergamo, the place of his beginning and that of his inspirational theatrical predecessor, Arlecchino.
He's survived by Kathryn, his mother and father, and his youthful brothers, Renato and Giuliano.
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