The Italian actor Marcello Magni, who has died aged 63 of prostate cancer, was a co-founder of Complicité (originally known as Théâtre de Complicité) in 1983 and remained at the heart of one of the most interesting and imaginative producing operations in Europe, let alone the UK.
Like his Complicité colleagues Annabel Arden, Simon McBurney and Jozef Houben, Magni trained in Paris at the school of the mime, mask and physical theatre expert Jacques Lecoq, and the techniques acquired there informed all the company’s work over the next 40 years. He was half a step ahead of them already, hailing from Bergamo in northern Italy, the home town of the first, mid-16th century Arlecchino (Harlequin).
Magni had the innate skill, grace and emotional wit of the improvisatory acrobatic and linguistic stock gags – lazzi – in the commedia dell’arte that he first displayed in an early show, Arlecchino, at the Battersea Arts Centre, south-west London.
There was, also, the still gravity and eccentricity of Harpo Marx, and indeed of Woody Allen, in his comic persona, which burst forth in More Bigger Snacks (1983), a madcap scenario featuring four bizarre derelicts devising escape routes from their shabby habitat, as if Waiting for Godot was invaded by The Young Ones.
When this show was reprised in a 1988 four-month residency at Pierre Audi’s Almeida in north London, the theatre world really woke up to the Complicité phenomenon, a collaboration with no “method” or policy beyond “turbulent forward momentum”.
The season’s centrepiece was a revival by Arden and McBurney of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s macabre parable The Visit, in which a provincial town acquires prosperity by conspiring to murder one of its leading citizens. This version of the play – tremendous music, swirling movement, comic characters worthy of Gogol, brilliant scenography – was, said Peter Brook, better than his own fabled version starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, in English in 1958 following the play’s premiere in German two years earlier.
The Fontanne role of the world’s richest woman was superbly taken by Kathryn Hunter in a career-defining performance as she joined the company and fell in love with Magni. Thereafter, professionally and in private life, the couple were inseparable, and in 2011 they married. Other crucial artists attached to Complicité were the writer/director Neil Bartlett, and the directors Annie Castledine and Helena Kaut-Howson.
The last of these directed a stunning 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 were also paired in King Lear at the Leicester Haymarket in 1997 (Kaut-Howson directing Hunter as Lear, Magni as the Fool) and Brecht’s Mother Courage, directed by Nancy Meckler for Shared Experience (New Ambassadors, 2000).
Their last appearance on stage together came in February 2022 as the Old Man and Old Woman in Ionesco’s The Chairs at the Almeida; they had invited a huge crowd (of chairs, it turns out) to their circular tower to hear an “important” message before making separate exits into the river below, where they drowned. In Ionesco, the orator with the message is speechless; in this version, Toby Sedgwick reeled off a catalogue of catastrophe and cataclysm.
Magni was the eldest of three sons of Miranda (nee Calliari), a specialist in art therapy for recovering children, and Corrado Magni, a road and bridge construction surveyor. He was educated at the Liceo Filippo Lussana of Bergamo and, after a year’s military service, the University of Bologna, where he studied literature and philosophy.
Complicité was one of the two key powerhouse fringe companies of the 1980s, the other being Cheek By Jowl, which concentrated on more canonical classics. In addition to his work with Complicité, Magni was drawn, with Hunter, to working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and more significantly, Mark Rylance’s Shakespeare’s Globe.
For the former, they co-directed the medieval morality play Everyman in 1996; and at the Globe they worked together on The Comedy of Errors (1999) – Hunter directing, Magni outstandingly funny and ingenious as both Dromios – and Pericles (2005). As Hunter said, Magni was a natural for the Globe, sharing with Rylance a special warmth and talent for embracing that large arena without visible strain.
Best of all, though, were Complicité’s co-productions with Richard Eyre’s National Theatre, which introduced the prose work of two leading European surrealists, Bruno Schulz and Daniil Kharms, both involving Magni and Hunter, in stagings of hallucinatory power and Dostoyevskian, visceral passion: Street of Crocodiles (1992, based on the life and fictions of Schulz) and Out of a House Walked a Man (1994, based on the writings of Kharms). These shows should have been bottled and dispensed on prescription to audiences down the years.
Brook’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris was a natural magnet for Complicité actors, and many beautiful works emerged at the start of this century. There Brook directed five short Beckett plays, Fragments, in 2007 – followed by a world tour – in which Hunter reinvented Rockaby and Magni played both an optimist and a pessimist in different versions of Rough for Theatre 1. In Come and Go, Hunter and Magni were joined by Houben, three women sitting in coats and hats on a park bench, holding hands “in the old way”.
And when Magni played Willie in Beckett’s Happy Days, normally a distant, silent figure, Brook hailed “a proper actor” as he integrated him more fully into the play. Other Brook projects he graced at the Bouffes were a controversial, beautiful, pared-down A Magic Flute (2010); a portfolio of theoretical writing on theatre by Meyerhold and others, Why? (2019); and finally a unique double as high-flying Ariel and drunken Stephano in The Tempest (2020), Brook finding, he said, in Magni’s Ariel – light in movement, profound in feeling – “a quality in the character I’ve been seeking for years” over many productions.
Magni’s screen work was confined to cameos in a few films – Steve Barron’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996), Rob Marshall’s Nine (2009) and a hilarious episode, The Eleventh Hour (2010), in the Matt Smith Doctor Who era, as the villainous owner of a rabidly vicious dog with whom he merged appearance and personality. The director was convinced he would have to use computer graphics, but so astonishing was Magni’s performance that the effect was fully achieved and the scene shot in just two takes.
The actor appeared to be able to do anything, even speak in Penguinese as an inquisitive Penguin – as well as a dozen other characters – in the voiceover to the children’s claymation series Pingu.
In the last stages of his illness, Magni returned to Bergamo, the place of his birth and that of his inspirational theatrical predecessor, Arlecchino.
He is survived by Kathryn, his parents, and his younger brothers, Renato and Giuliano.
• Marcello Luigi Giuseppe Magni, actor and director, born 27 June 1959; died 18 September 2022
