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.
— Simon McBurney
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.
Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.
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?'
I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.
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 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.
Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.
If you're an actor, go out and act.
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 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.
'The Magic Flute,' I think, is fundamentally asking what is it to change people's consciousness.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 years, I wasn't in the least bit interested in opera.
