Simon McBurney

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0:13Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading creative figures reveal their most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the director and actor Simon McBurney, one of the founders of the groundbreaking theatre company Complicite. For over four decades, McBurney has created innovative and experimental works, from immersive stagings to the reinvention of classic texts. His works include A Disappearing Number, The Encounter, and Mnemonic, a landmark production which has recently been revived at the National Theatre.

0:52Simon McBurney, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you so much for having me. You were born in Cambridge in 1957. Take us back to home life. What was family life like? Well, it was a huge, gloomy, Victorian, semi-detached house. And there was a huge garden and curious people coming in and out because my father was a professor of archaeology at Cambridge. But the house itself is the thing, when you say that, that I can remember so vividly. all the smells come back and my father's study, which was completely chaotic with stuff everywhere and on the wall a huge section of a trench with earth on it of different sections and I remember him saying to me, it gets older as you go down, time is vertical.

1:46It was full of books everywhere, extremely cold, no central heating except once a year at Christmas, open fires, gas fires, my golly, it sounds incredibly primitive, and two Bakelite phones, one at the bottom of the stairs and one at the top. And you've already made a direct link between a memory and a work in Later, which I want to talk about later, the vertical line, which is a piece that you made in, I think, 1999. Yes. Which was about time. Yes. It being vertical rather than horizontal, how we would normally think. Did he encourage you to think like that and to explore archaeology as a kid?

2:25Well, my father was extremely absent-minded and when he forgot things, which he did frequently, my mother would say, Odell is thinking about his flints with great sort of approbation. My mother was incredibly present, incredibly creative. She had been secretary to Rebecca West and typed Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and the Fountain Overflows. and in fact Rebecca West was kind of like a surrogate grandmother to us because we didn't have any grandparents. But my mother would write little plays for us, would do pantomimes every year. She would adapt the music from the sound of music and then play it on the piano while we had a little curtain and then we would perform.

3:12So as early as I can remember, we were all playing and performing. Had she worked in the theatre or was this just... She wanted to work in the theatre. She had been sent away on what they called in the 30s finishing school for middle class girls. And she'd gone to Paris and she had classes with a doyen of the Comédie Française whose name was Denis Dinez. And he said at the end of the year that they were working together, Mademoiselle, vous pouvez avoir une carrière dans la comédie. You can have a career in comedy. So she went back home and she said to her parents around the brown table at lunch, and she said, I'm so excited, I've decided what I want to do.

3:57I'm going to go into the theatre and I'm going to specialise in comedy. And there was a dead silence. And her father put down his knife and fork either side of his plate. And everybody waited and he said, women don't work and they certainly don't go into the theatre. And she always used to say, and that was that. I was so stupid. But the Second World War, of course, changed everything because she had to work. She was in the women's RAF. Before that, she was a nurse. She saw the boys coming back from Dunkirk. I think she saw appalling things. And afterwards, immediately, she started looking for work and then fell in to become secretary to Rebecca West, which was where she met my father.

4:38They were cousins, in fact. I love the way you inhabited that memory there and dramatised it. Well, she died in 1982 and my father died in 1979. So when you asked about my childhood, it suddenly starts to... It's suddenly present. Yes, it's suddenly very present. So archaeological timelines and flints and... That's right, and going on digs every year in Jersey, an extraordinary place called La Côte de Saint-Brelade on the coast of Jersey in the early spring when the gales came up from the Bay of Biscay and we would all camp in this deserted quarry. And the site that my father was digging was a Neanderthal site.

5:16It was about 120 ,000 years old. And it was extraordinary, people digging in the cold and the rain and my father standing over the trenches and then us spending the time wandering down in the rock pools on the beach. That was a very powerful experience growing up. And I remember when I was 17 and knowing that I was going away for the last time I was on the boat going from Jersey to Weymouth, I think it was, and I saw the headland and my parents used to jump up and down and wave washing up cloths so that you could actually see it from the boat. And I remember actually bursting into tears knowing that that was somehow the end of something, the end of my childhood or the end of what I had grown up.

5:59It was marvellous because, you know, you were with young students all with long hair and who never washed for two or three weeks and slept in their boots. And these, for me, were heroes. It was sort of in the 60s, so there was a sense of disobedience as well with their hair long and their beards and their moustaches and their jokes. So you have this sort of entree into the adult world, but what about normal childhood things at home, you know, television and comics? Ah, yes, well, this is the thing. There was no television in our house. There was no television and very rarely was there radio. There was what my father called a hi-fi.

6:37so there were records but not even very many of those there was very little recorded material I complained regularly about the fact that I was missing out and I had to make up things at school so people would say did you see the episode of Doctor Who last night I'd go yeah yeah it was amazing and you know in fact I remember standing outside people's houses when the television was on and watching their television silently through the window, because it was sort of this mysterious thing. But certainly books, diving into them. Fiction? Yes, a lot of historical fiction, and then Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and all the usual suspects.

7:25Then suddenly a copy of Arthur Kessler's Darkness at Noon, which I read aged 11. It had a profound effect on me, the darkness of the world appearing to me for the first time, I remember.

7:43On This Cultural Life, Simon McBurney, I ask my guests to choose the most significant influences and experiences that have informed their own creativity. And your first choice is the film Kez by Ken Loach.

8:00So when did you first see that, given that you didn't have a television? Well, I was sent away to school and it was on in the town and I skived off to see it and sat in a small provincial cinema and I had never seen anything like it and I wept profoundly. The sense of injustice really profoundly affected me and also suddenly this extraordinary, totally visceral portrait of life in the North which I had never experienced and understanding in one film what it meant to live in that kind of poverty. Come on, tell us about this home. Where did you get it from? I found it, sir. Where? In the woods. Where do you keep it?

8:58In the shed. What do you feed it, son? Beef, mice, birds. Isn't it cruel to keep it in the shed? I mean, wouldn't it be happier flying free? I don't keep it in the shed all the time, sir. Fly it every day. Doesn't it fly away? I thought they were wild birds. Of course it don't fly away, sir. Train it. Are you going to tell us about it? How do you train it all? We have to be very careful with them, sir. I'm very patient. I loved birds of prey. I remember finding as a child, I remember finding a dead kestrel and being so fascinated by it that I took it to a taxidermist on the outskirts of Norwich because I wanted to keep it and he stuffed it.

9:39It had been killed by pesticides, I think. And so there was something about animals and nature and the wild And it was so extraordinary the way that then Ken Loach linked this with the sense of repression. And the young boy's, Casper's sense of freedom came from the hawk. But the hawk as well revealed something about the injustice of the nature of our country. I'm not putting it very well, but it was literally a visceral sensation. and I came out of the cinema and it was sort of the first time my eyes were opened to something else. It's interesting, isn't it? Because it's possibly Ken Loach's least overtly political film and yet what you're saying is that you got a sense of injustice.

10:28There was a kind of political engagement with the film, even at that age, was there? Absolutely, and the bullying in the school was astonishing. You know, Brian Glover leading the football field.

10:44Come on quickly, Casper. I've never seen such slack work in my life. I've never seen such slack work in my life. What's that for, sir? Slack work, lad, slack work. Let that ball out the field, Parker. And all of his films, really, the way they open a window onto something, the extraordinary way that it's filmed, in which you are there but you're not intruding on people because there's a modesty and a humility in the way that he films, which means the people themselves and the story is the thing. There is almost nothing in between you and what is happening, and that's what I felt. And that engagement with Kez, I mean, you know, it's not really a spoiler to say there is a heartbreaking ending involving the bird itself, but was there a connection, an emotional connection because of your own stuffed Kestrel at home, do you think?

11:35I don't know. But the denouement of Kez for me was absolutely devastating. Already there was something about how can we treat the living world in this way. I mean, I'm analysing it now, partly because you're sitting there and asking me about these things, but I suppose it was that. Do you think there was any direct influence of that film or of the work of Ken Loach on your own work? I mean, it's really difficult. I was trying to think so much coming onto the programme about what has actually influenced me. And it's wonderful to be able to choose and talk about these things. But it's the solution in which we all bathe.

12:19There's all these different elements. Yeah, he's always been in my soul. And so it's really curious sometimes I find to talk about culture as if it's a separate thing. I think this is a very modern idea and there is an attack on the idea of culture and the arts. In that attack, I constantly want to say, well, there isn't, you know, there isn't a sector called culture. There's no sector called the arts. It is who we are. It is the solution we bathe in. The fact that I can talk to you and I'm using words and I'm trying to find them from some place in my brain and make sense, That itself is a creative act.

13:03We are creative beings, eternally curious. And, unfortunately, the time that we live in, it's as if the arts and culture, they're a little sort of petit fou or something added on. No, they are the main meal. We are our culture, we are our language, and it is actually the most fundamental thing as human beings. Culture and life are one and the same thing, interchangeably. Which is why this programme is called This Cultural Life. Yes, very neat.

13:36Your next choice is punk rock, and specifically seeing the clash at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1977. So you would have been about 20 years old at the time. What the hell is wrong with you? What are your memories of that gig? A huge number of people. sweat, smell, kind of chaos in the audience, obviously no seats, people pushing, jostling, and just unbelievable energy. And there was, in my house growing up until I was 13, I never really heard any what my father would call pop music, let alone rock music. And then that sort of hurtled in on me in my teens, and, you know, hearing Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin and then David Bowie dressing up, of course that appealed to me because it was theatrical.

14:33And then cutting through all of that stuff was suddenly something else.

14:49To hear them coming on stage and Joe Strummer at the microphone and the spit, everybody spitting, and the sweat. It seemed to me suddenly incredibly truthful. It wasn't just about some sort of fairy imagination. It felt as if it was tearing into society. It felt as if it was challenging power.

15:16All of the 70s for me constituted a huge kind of political social awakening in which I suddenly realised, having been in this extraordinary, imaginative cocoon, you know, I had grown up in a situation of great privilege, but suddenly I felt trapped by that. And then to follow it all the way into the Rock Against Racism marches in Victoria Park, I mean, I was taken there essentially by that first Clash concert. Because the Clash headline of Victoria. Yeah, that's right, that's right.

15:58So you were at that gig and that was something which was responding to, not generally about the division in the country at the time, but specifically about the racism on the streets. That's right. And it became a very violent time. It had become an extraordinarily violent time. There was dissent in the country and all sorts of struggles started to join up. questioning what we were doing in Northern Ireland, questioning where are we going if we're not creating a new society.

16:38You'd moved to the university and you saw the clash there at around that time. What were you studying at Cambridge? I was studying English literature. You joined Footlights, I think, hadn't you? Is it really two years? It seems like about five minutes. Yes. How time flies. I mean, it certainly stood still when we were married, didn't it? So you'd had a thought to a theatrical career of some sort? Well, I think I went to university very simply because I wanted to please my father. I had done very badly in my A-levels and I then went to the Cambridge Tech and my brother, because I only then had one decent A-level in English, suggested I take Cambridge entrance.

17:23And it was the first exam I actually enjoyed. I got a place. But it wasn't really, because I had grown up there, it wasn't the sort of dreaming spires and extraordinary places. It was for other people. And I quickly found myself on the edge and I had already a sense that I wanted to make theatre. And so I just started at the university and I would do about three shows a term, I guess. I went to Edinburgh three times and I started to discover that I was funny. But my father died when I was at Cambridge. And I suppose the consequence of Cambridge was I knew that if I decided to go on a certain path, there was a kind of gravy train.

18:10I suddenly felt sort of constricted by it and I felt an overwhelming desire to escape, really. I left the UK in 1980 and I spent the next four years in Paris. Was this the Jacques Lecoq Institute? I went to the Jacques Lecoq Institute for two years and then I also performed with the French Theatre Company and that really, being in Paris, really changed my life considerably. Tell me about Jacques Lecoq, because that's a very different ethos, isn't it? Every week for two years we had to produce a piece of theatre that we made in a group. A group of people that you couldn't possibly get on with, so you were arguing and shouting and then cooperating, kind of.

18:53But you had to make something which was generally pretty awful every single week. But what it taught you was something about the fundamental organism of creativity, which is that creativity always is about an exchange, is about a relationship. And it was here that you met the co-founders of what was to become your theatre company, Teatro de Complicité, now known as Complicité, of course. Where did the idea initially start then, to form this troupe, and what was the ethos? There were four of us, Annabel Arden, Fiona Gordon, and my very good beloved friend, Macero Magni, who died two years ago. It was simply that we wanted to work.

19:36We wanted to play. We wanted to get on stage. And I used to perform on the streets as well. I just want to perform. I loved Beckett. In fact, I once saw him in Paris walking on the other side of the street. And so I wanted to find out something about a different voice. That was all it was to begin with. Nothing happened in the show, but it made people laugh a lot. I was sitting in a deck chair on a beach and Fiona was in another one and we just hung around on stage and it was completely ridiculous. We were very influenced by a Belgian group called Radayas, which means radish, who did these totally absurdist pieces in which there was no story at all.

20:16But one of the key components of Complicite is the physicality, isn't it? So just give us a sense of why and how much you took from Jacques Lecoq in terms of expressing stories and narratives through just physical presence. Well, that's the eternal question. You know, I've always slightly balked at the idea of sort of physical theatre because all theatre is physical. Perhaps sometimes we're a little tied up. We were certainly a little tied up in this country. And we can see that because we call the people who come to the theatre the audience. Whereas in France, they call them les spectateurs. So the people who watch, we call them the audience, the people who listen.

20:51But the point was that in Paris, what changed my mind is that I saw theatre from all over the world. so I got the chance to see, for example, the great Tadjusz Kanto from Poland and seeing The Dead Class and that was in their bodies. They lived it. It was the most terrifying piece of theatre that I had ever seen and that absolutely, seeing that performance, The Dead Class, changed my life forever.

21:30And I suppose the theatre that I saw in Paris at that time was not available in London, seeing Peter Stein's Oresteia, for example, and, of course, the work of Peter Brook at the Bouffier-Denor. I could suddenly see that the theatre was not something that I had grown up with, and I adored the theatre, although what I adored most as a child was the pantomime and Cyril Fletcher taking his teeth out. That was the most marvellous thing for me. But it sounded like it liberated your imagination and gave you licence to put on a work which The Street of Crocodiles is not an obvious source of material to stage.

22:06Based on the writings of Bruno Schulz, who was a Polish Jewish writer who died in the Second War, but an extraordinary Kafkaesque character whose imagination was absolutely wild, and yet at the same time he captured something of the 19th century and pre-war life in Eastern Europe and something about the nature of the inner world and the outer world was just marvellous. So there wasn't any gap between something fantastic happening and something utterly realistic. And this was something that really excited me. Was Street of Crocodiles the first big success then? For about five years, we made pieces that made people laugh, essentially.

22:52That was the fundamental thing. Behind them were different texts, but the second piece called A Minute Too Late was about my father's death, funniest piece we ever did, and more bigger snacks now, which was about the fact that we were living on the dole, we didn't have any money, please, please, please, which was about the fact that Christmas is always a disaster and everybody beats each other up, and then Anything for a Quiet Life, which was based on a Pushkin short play. So we'd done quite a lot of work, and I sort of thought, well, that's it. The company didn't really exist. We were a bunch of disparate animals sort of with energy firing off in every direction.

23:29And then I was given this book, The Street of Crocodiles, and something sparked off in my mind. Even if it was Polish, even if it was in another culture, I felt extraordinarily close to it. there was something about the Cambridge house and the dreaming and the imagination and the fantasy that I had, which was there in the writing of Bruno Schulz. Do we have any wind on carts that we could borrow from another show just to try it out this afternoon? Can I say something about the pans? I still don't hear the pans. I make a thousand more noise on the stove with Hayley. Don't worry about the pans. I'll deal with the pans later.

24:09I don't want to get into discussion about pans. We're running out of time. No, I want to say the pans go over my line, don't go out without your coat. Can you wait till I've said that? Yeah. Possibly. Yeah, OK. Other than that, let's shut up about the pans. César, that's much better with the Gale coat. Seems really making sense there. Was there a point where you made a decision to become the director, to become more of this sort of artistic driving force behind the company, rather than a performing member of the company? Not really, I just had a lot of energy. And what about when you were? because, I mean, you're adapting work, but, I mean, in terms of creating new work as well.

24:45Yeah, I didn't really want to be a director. I just wanted to be eternally somebody arsing around and making stuff and performing. I mean, very often the pieces we kind of discovered in performing them, they would be very loose structures and gradually as you perform them, they would turn into something. But we had an idea that I would lead the company for three years and somebody else would and somebody else would. but it sort of fell out that nobody else quite wanted to. So it's stayed with me and there is a kind of just a very big... The Complicity family is very, very wide and they come from all over the world and that, I suppose, as a child, that almost sort of reproduces the team on my father's excavation.

25:31It's a tribe of people that you have.