Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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.

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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.

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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.

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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.

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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.

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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.

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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.

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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.

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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

Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney

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.