Words matter. These are the best Simon McBurney Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As a child, acting just seemed like a natural extension of my love of play – and if you’ve forgotten how to play, you shouldn’t be an actor.
We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.
‘The Master and Margarita’ is deeply to do with the unconscious. It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he’s not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate.
Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.
The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it.
My work is not generally in the commercial sector. However, I’m not worried by the commercial sector. I refuse to work in any other way except the way that I work.
‘The Magic Flute,’ I think, is fundamentally asking what is it to change people’s consciousness.
Any play that’s making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.
I was keen to stage ‘Faust,’ although I find Goethe’s ‘Faust’ indigestible.
In the theatre, because you’re all looking at the same thing in the same space, consciousness is no longer individual. There is a unified consciousness. Until you look and project what is happening, it doesn’t exist; the audience are the ones making the theatre, not the players.
I don’t have what German directors call ‘a concept’ – a solid, fixed sense of the pattern that you should impose on the given work. I always get the feeling that I am raking up the earth rather than laying down the concrete.
For years, I wasn’t in the least bit interested in opera.
Living in France while the Falklands War was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don’t talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many different ways.
I spent the majority of time at school trying to break the rules. I would climb to the top of buildings; I even burned a building down once – not intentionally, just because I was interested in fire. I remember going through the rule book, ticking off the ones I had broken and looking for the ones I hadn’t.
I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we’re all excavating and trying to find something.
When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read ‘Death of a Salesman.’ I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves.
Theatre is about the collective imagination… Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text – but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV.
There’s something hopeful about ‘Endgame.’ Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There’s this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light.
In France, they call the people who come to the theatre ‘les spectateurs’; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here.
Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way, it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse.
When I met Miller, for me it wasn’t a question of wanting to meet him because it was Arthur Miller; it was a kind of astonishment that I could meet someone who was so deeply embedded in the psyche of my artistic development.
Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.
So you might say, ‘Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?’ Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality – so the function of art is to make things – to show: ‘Hang on, this is real.’
Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it’s gone.
‘Mnemonic’ is a play about memory.
My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.
For me, acting is like a holiday. When you’re directing, you have a strong sense of responsibility for others. It’s exciting but exhausting, especially when you’re like me: always wanting to break the rules.
The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.
Everyone sees something different in ‘Endgame’: a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth – not about the play, but about the person watching it.
I sometimes feel I would like to do crazy things with ‘Endgame,’ where someone says something, but the words, instead of being spoken, are written words projected out of their mouth.
Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world’s earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public.
The very beautiful and very touching thing about opera singers is they are very willing to do whatever you want. Unlike actors, who constantly want to know why they’re doing something, opera singers will sort of follow you into the fires of hell.
Most people won’t order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic.
I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it’s a doddle because you’ve got an audience.
When I was doing ‘A Disappearing Number’ in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn’t written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles.
