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" Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public. "

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" Mozart's seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That's what I've found working on 'The Magic Flute.' "

Simon McBurney

Profound

Magic

Light

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

" 'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light. "

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

" 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. "

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

" For years, I wasn't in the least bit interested in opera. "

" My work is not generally in the commercial sector. However, I'm not worried by the commercial sector. I refuse to work in any other way except the way that I work. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "