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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Simon McBurney

Climb

Broken

Book

" 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. "

Simon McBurney

Structure

Hidden

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Simon McBurney

Father

Say

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

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

" 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 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.' "

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

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

" 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

Pants

Late

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

Simon McBurney

Nobody

Theatre

" 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. "