Italian Actor Dead After Hanging Scene Performance

Raphael Schumacher, the Italian actor who accidentally strangled himself during a live theatre performance, has been declared clinically dead.

The production involves scenes staged at different locations at the venue, with patrons walking to and interacting with the actors performing at each spot.

The scene was allegedly written into the show last minute, according to Italian newspaper II Giorno.

At the time of the incident, he was reciting a monologue from Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening alone in a courtyard in front of just one spectator.

He was taken to hospital on Saturday night and has been in a coma since.

Raphael Schumacher, 27, was starring in the six-scene play Mirages in Pisa when something went wrong during a scene in which his character was hanged and he began to choke.

He was wearing a mask for the scene, which was performed successfully earlier in the same evening, but a recent medical graduate saw him trembling and realised something was wrong.

A CNN report claims others working on the production had no knowledge of the hanging having been written into the play. Now, 27-year-old Raphael Schumacher is dead, and two directors and two stage technicians are being investigated for manslaughter, as ANSA News reported.

Schumacher’s family and friends immediately ruled out suicide, with his mother telling Italian media that “he left no messages and had no reason to kill himself”.

“We are shocked”, Gabriele De Luca, the theater’s art director, told the Daily Mail. “No one, not even us, realizes how this occurred and it’s going to be up to law enforcement to shed light onto it”.