Simon McBurney Quotations

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.

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.

In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.

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.

Mozart's seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That's what I've found working on 'The Magic Flute.'

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.

My experience of my father's death was that it was still taboo; nobody would meet me after my father died because they didn't know what to say.

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.

Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.

If you're an actor, go out and act.

'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.

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.

Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.

When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.

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.

For some years, I've been very interested in the relationship between science and art.

For years, I wasn't in the least bit interested in opera.

I constantly want to know - what is a table, or what is a cat?

I don't tend to get cast in the theatre much. People assume I come with all this baggage. But they do cast me in films. In films, I'm a nobody.

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.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

I suppose I'm really interested in theatre that provides an intensity of experience on another level.

I was keen to stage 'Faust,' although I find Goethe's 'Faust' indigestible.

I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong.

I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.

I've had various people close to me die, and I don't necessarily find the idea of death purely depressing.

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.

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.

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.

Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world.

Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.

Most people won't order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic.

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.

I find all food irresistible. I have friends who live in the mountains in France. One of them sells vegetables, and to walk through her garden when everything is bursting out - it's impossible not to eat something.

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.

I allow people to create, but I'm also marshalling everybody, which is difficult for my creativity, as I'm like a referee. Everybody else is kicking a ball. It is very messy. From the mess, though, you refine what is there.

Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?'

My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against 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.

My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.

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.

With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time.

The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.

When my mother was dying, I cooked for her. One of the things I realised was that the smell and look of the food was key. I concentrated on how it looked on the plate. Even if the amount was small, it gave her a nourishment of a different kind.

'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

As an actor, it's much easier for me to get work in the movies because nobody knows who I am except for the work that I've done in another movie. I really enjoy that.

The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it.

The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen.

The repeated action of working and playing acts like a trowel that uncovers a hidden structure under the earth. It is an action that deepens and develops.

Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone.

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.

I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story, you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space.

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.

In Japan, sometimes it's hard to know what you are looking at.

I'm naturally attracted to something I don't understand because when you try to deal with something you don't understand, it opens a door into another world.

I remember the fact that milk was delivered every day by a milkman. In summer, my mother would make what now seem in my middle-aged imagination the most delicious iced milkshakes.

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.

In my opinion, there's nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else.

In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo.

I don't recall making a conscious decision to become an actor. I just remember winning a prize at a theatre festival when I was 17 and saying: 'Oh, that's what I have to do.'

I don't really think about a visual aspect to the work at all; I just think about making the piece. And everything that occurs visually comes out of the subject matter you are dealing with so that I find it difficult to treat the visual element as a separate entity.

'The Magic Flute,' I think, is fundamentally asking what is it to change people's consciousness.

The more they uncover the more mystery appears to be there...

The other, the other aspect when I say I'm an actor is that as an actor you make this imaginative leap into being somebody else, that's to say the muscle of the imagination is as important as any other of the muscles in your body, and so it is something about this instinct in space and time which for me I associate with being an actor rather than a director.

Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.

When you make something, if you are a painter or a writer, a degree, or a sculptor or whatever or a musician, a degree of energy is required to make it, and I'm not sure that it is always aggressive, but when you have a great deal of energy it can appear to be more aggressive than it is. In fact, I mean you can talk about a waterfall being aggressive, but in fact it is just a very powerful forward movement of energy, and although I think sometimes my engine house is a kind of anger.

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.

People expect the math to be simplified, but I want to surprise them right from the start. When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.

I can't remember a single year of my life when I haven't made a piece of theatre.

I sometimes feel that I am trying to dig in the world around me. I'm involved in another kind of archaeology to look for another kind of truth, and the moment I find, the moment I am separated from that life, the moment I am sort of in a world, every time I have gone out and performed in the, in the cinema for example, if you do two or three films on the trot you suddenly have this impression that you're becoming separate or separated from the world around you.

We try to place the human body in relation to the image all the time, so it's never a kind of a backdrop, but it's more of ...a much more integrative experience.

Every time I make, I've made a piece of work, I've wanted to get rid of it, obliterate it and do the next thing, because it was never quite what I wanted. I think the moment you think you've arrived is the moment that you should stop.

Any fifth language that you use should be equally used as just another bit of theater language, so that if you have a strong text, then the light should be as strongly part of that text as, for example, the sound it should be or whatever it is that you see.

Normally when people ask me what I do I say I'm an actor, and that's what I always wanted to be and that's the way I approach work even when I'm directing it.

I think it was a desire to be able to find my own voice. I think that was the big urge within me.

One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.

The only way that you can keep moving forward, finding other ways of expressing things about this increasingly complicated world that we live in, is by listening and observing not only to life around you but to the other people who are in the room. It's not about a sort of, you know, a sense that you have to be democratic about these things, it's a question of creativity that the process of making theatre is a collaborative process, and it is not in, it is not a question of, you know, I have no interest in paying lip service to it, for me it's absolutely fundamental.

I mean I'm talking about playing games, about imagining other people, and it's part of the way that it helps you actually see the world.

I suppose as an actor you become very sensitive to rhythm, not just rhythm as you look at it sort of from the, from the outside as a director might see it, but within yourself you become used to the idea of hearing your fellow actors, responding to them in space.

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.

I had a teacher in Paris, who said that if an actor forgot what it's like to play as a child he shouldn't be an actor. I've always loved being with children. It's marvellous to see the fresh ways they see the world. Watching them look at a tree or a river helps you to understand something that's very important.

Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.

The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience. That audience looks collectively at what is going on on the stage and collectively imagines that this is real.

Theatre artists are essentially sort of charlatans and thieves, I mean that's the tradition that we come from, so I have absolutely no, I make no bones about the fact that I steal from here and I take from there, and we all do it, that's perfectly all right, that's the nothing, there's nothing new in the world, there's nothing actually new in the way that you do something, but the point is is how do you take something and use it to articulate what is essentially a core of any given theatrical production.

We live in an age where quantity is seen as preferable to quality, and many people tend to work in a horizontal line: next, next, next. But if you do that, you never investigate the vertical line - the depth of the piece.