ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The works and poetics of Carmelo Bene are very rich and prolific, and embrace almost forty years of author activity, from 1959 to 2002.

His controversial and controversial figure, often the object of clamorous polemics, has divided criticism and public since the beginnings: considered by some a distressing deceiver and a presumed "massacrator" of texts, for other Goods was one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century. From the declarations of Bene it is evident his contempt for some theatrical criticism, from him considered "piena di parvenus". Among the first to pay tribute to him are some of the most illustrious members of the intellectual world of the time, such as, for example, Eugenio Montale, Alberto Moravia, Ennio Flaiano and Pier Paolo Pasolini. He then collaborated, among others, with Pierre Klossowski and Gilles Deleuze, who wrote some essays on the way of making theatre of the Italian artist. The struggle of Good is directed against naturalism and bourgeois dramaturgy, against the classical visions of the theatre. Revenge the actors' art by raising the actor from mere mastery (as defined by Silvio D'Amico) to an absolute artist-personification of the theatrical complex. The text, since born from the pen of a writer often avulsed by the problem of scenic language, cannot be interpreted: it must necessarily be recreated by the actor.

Carmelo Bene is against the theater of text, for a theater he called "stage script", a theater of the saying and not of the saying. Doing "theatre of the already said" would be a repeat by memory the words of others without creativity, what Artaud called a "theater of inverts, droghieri, imbecilli, fennels: in a word of Western". It is the actor, with the stage writing, to make theater hic et nunc. The text is considered as "swimming", because the show must be seen in its totality. The text has the same value as other elements such as lights, music, scenes. The text theater, of empathy, is defined by Bene as a cabaret theatre. The actors who fall into roles, who play, are for him entertainers, ambushes, "trovarobe". In his theatre, the actor is the Artefice. The text is no longer highlighted as in the text theater, it is indeed marred, continuing a speech started by Artaud, who had already begun the destruction of language, but that for Bene failed on the scenes, because it fell into interpretation.

Well destroys the ego on the scene, the empathy in a role, in favor of a subject-actor theater. Well it has been called Actor Artifex, that is, an actor of everything, and he himself preferred to define himself, with a neologism, a "actor machine": author, director, actor, scenographer, costume designer. Much of Carmelo Bene's literary works can be found collected in a single volume, entitled Opere, with the Autograph of a portrait, in the series of Classes