Music, There is Always Music.

He is regarded as a genius of British theatre, inspiring both as a director and actor: Simon McBurney is fascinated by the fragmentary, the unknown - making him the ideal director for Modest Mussorgsky's unfinished opera »Khovanshchina«. A portrait.

Simon McBurney © Maarit Kytöharju

By Lyn Gardner

»I want to tell you a story,« says Janina, the unassuming ageing woman who narrates »Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead« (2023), Simon McBurney’s nightmarish, visually arresting stage version of the William Blake inspired ecological parable written by Polish Nobel Prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk. Like much of McBurney’s work it is a piece which swerves masterfully between the surreal and the everyday, and the sinister and the acerbically funny as it examines our relationship to nature and considers acts of resistance. Janina’s story becomes a piece of theatre that can itself be read as a call to arms.

Telling stories - seldom linear ones, often tangled narratives - has for 40 years driven a remarkable body of work made by the theatre and opera director, writer and actor Simon McBurney. Most frequently, but not always, that has been with the company he co-founded in 1983, Complicité.

Motivated by Ignorance

His storytelling, unfettered by borders - either geographical or imaginative - has been a restless quest to understand the world in which we live, the immensity of the past (his father, was a professor of archaeology at Cambridge university), human emotions from grief to envy, and signpost new ways of living and thinking and connecting to nature. He has said that he is motivated by his own ignorance. »I am naturally attracted to something I don’t understand, because when you try to deal with something you don’t understand, it opens a door to another world«.

Scene from Simon McBurney's »Mnemonic« at London's National Theatre« © Johan Persson

Those other worlds have included an examination of the process of memory and the traces we leave behind in the ground-breaking »Mnemonic« (1999), the complexities of time in »The Vertical Line« (1999), made in collaboration with John Berger, the unexpected collision of mathematical equations and inter-personal relationships in the hugely moving »A Disappearing Number« (2007), and European consciousness in »The Encounter« (2016). The latter was an unsettlingly intimate theatrical journey deep into the Amazon jungle and the mind. For »The Encounter« audiences wore headsets which delivered the sound directly into their ears using binaural technology. It felt as if you had fallen headlong into the brain of a stranger.

McBurney’s shows act as necessary reminders that theatre is an act of transmission, grounded in ritual and it is that repeated ritual which brings us together, makes our hearts beat in unison. He frequently uses the simplest and most ancient of theatrical devices to achieve that, often just the human body itself. Or maybe a chair or two. Or perhaps a cracked plate representing the moon. Or he embraces older technologies such as the Bunraku-inspired puppetry in the satirical »The Heart of a Dog« at the English National Opera (2010), or the Foley artistry creating live sounds to match the action in »The Magic Flute« (2013, revived for New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2023). Music, there is always music.

The Magic Flute, Production by Simon McBurney

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»The Magic Flute« in the production by Simon McBurney, English National Opera, 2023 © Manuel Harlan

»The Magic Flute« in the production by Simon McBurney, Festival d'Aix-en-Prevence, 2018 © Pascal Victor

»The Magic Flute« in the production by Simon McBurney, Festival d'Aix-en-Prevence, 2018 © Pascal Victor

»The Magic Flute« in the production by Simon McBurney, English National Opera, 2023 © Manuel Harlan

»The Magic Flute« in the production by Simon McBurney, English National Opera, 2023 © Manuel Harlan

»The Magic Flute« in the production by Simon McBurney, English National Opera, 2023 © Manuel Harlan

Music Runs Through McBurney’s Work Like a River.

Curious, because he grew up in a household where there was little access to the radio and only a few records. He only discovered music for himself in his later teens, but it operates like an extra character in his productions, and his passion for its expressive possibilities is evident in both his theatre and opera stagings, the latter becoming increasingly frequent. If he came later to opera production that is perhaps a reflection of how slow British opera was to recognise how suited his directorial approach is to such a multi-facetted art form.

But he is unafraid of playing with emergent technologies too, (he was an early adopter of video projection) seeing them as just another tool in the paintbox, that enables the artist to tell a story in the most vivid way possible. His approach is eminently practical; always playful. The latter has always been a feature of McBurney and Complicité’s work. The company’s name celebrates the idea of the playful, the shared and the collaborative. There is a story, likely apocryphal, that when Complicité was first working at the National Theatre in the early 1990s, a scout sent by nervous senior management to see what was happening in the rehearsal room, reported back in outraged tones: »All they do is play!« But it is through play, that McBurney and his collaborators devise and create.

Over the years McBurney’s productions have taken us from 19th century Japan (»Shun-kin«, 2009), to 1930s Stalinist Moscow in the »The Master and Margarita« (2012) and Poland in »The Street of Crocodiles« (1992), inspired by a story by Polish Jew Bruno Schulz who was shot by the Gestapo in 1942. In »Crocodiles«, eggs rained from the ceiling over the family dinner table, a man walked down a wall, the legs of an unturned chair became the new shoots of a coming spring, and the sound of marching Jackboots was never far away.

There is a vibrancy and unpredictable quality about McBurney’s stagecraft which makes an audience lean a little further forward in their seats, but he eschews the flamboyant flourishes of the showman. The moments of astonishment are often quiet and reflective; always in service of telling a story, frequently making and marking unlooked for connections.

Simon McBurney as a Hollywood star: here in the latest remake of the gothic horror classic »Nosferatu«

Through the Centuries

In »Mnemonic«, for example, the simple act of the actors successively replacing each other prone on a table made an instant link for those of us watching in the audience with our own ancestors and a 5,500 year-old corpse discovered prone on an Alpine glacier in 1991. In that simple but startling visual image we both intellectually and emotionally understood that we are all part of a continuing cycle that stretches back through the centuries.

McBurney instinctively understands actors and their creative processes. Perhaps because he is one himself with a strong gift for comedy. His work often comes with comic bite, a sense of genuine delight in the absurdity of human existence. Alongside his own productions, he has cultivated a successful TV and movie career, whether playing the villain in »Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation« or most recently Herr Knock in Robert Eggers’ new version of the classic gothic horror film, »Nosferatu«. Those cultural references seep into his own work.

It is little wonder that his work has so delighted audiences and proved so influential with his peers. Thomas Ostermeier has said he is »the director I admire most«. Robert Icke calls him »a bona fide genius«. Yet genius suggests the swagger of certainty, and an unfettered singular vision. But every McBurney work is a great collaboration, a joint voyage of discovery made by all involved and founded not on knowing where or how the journey will end. There is a genuine possibility at the start of every project that it will prove unstageable. That it will not work. It makes the McBurney’s rehearsal rooms places of genuine risk and unexpected discovery and why the result is always so fully alive.

His long-time collaborator, the actor Kathryn Hunter, has described how McBurney »smells his way into a piece« stalking the rehearsal room as he »sniffs his way into a text«. McBurney himself says of his work, »I am not quite sure what it is until I’ve made it«.

Scene from Simon McBurneys »A Minute Too Late«, National Theatre, London, 1985 / 2005

Even When It Is Made, It Is Never Finished.

McBurney’s pieces are never nailed down and fixed; they are constantly evolving, living organic things which create space for audiences to bring their own imaginations to bear. They encourage the audience to be fully active, fully complicit. They trust and enable audiences to navigate the non-linear, the fragmentary, and find meaning in the imagery.

Whereas many British-based theatre-makers have been driven by text and live and work in the shadow of William Shakespeare, McBurney has always looked outwards towards Europe and beyond. Studying at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris in the early 1980s, his influences were the work of Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook and Peter Stein and European literature including Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Stefan Zweig, whose work he would subsequently stage - »The Visit« at the National Theatre in 1991; and »Beware of Pity« in 2017.

In the early days, McBurney’s work with Complicité was often dismissed by British critics, schooled in text-bound rigidities, as mere clowning and physical theatre. What few appreciated was how emotionally literate and politically engaged this work could be. »A Minute Too Late« ( 1985, revived 2005), inspired by McBurney’s beloved father’s demise, was an improbably heart-breaking comedy about death; »More Bigger Snacks Now« - which won the 1985 Perrier Award, the UK’s leading comedy prize - was a deceptive and acutely observed satire on capitalism, greed and a culture obsessed with accumulation.

Four decades on, the intellectual curiosity, emotional empathy and quiet political commentary of McBurney’s work remains as strong and necessary as it was when he began. He is a storyteller of real theatrical flair, but one who never stops asking himself and his audiences: why tell this story at this moment, and is it the indispensable one for the turbulent times in which we live?