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" 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. "

Simon McBurney

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting. "

" The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it. "

Simon McBurney

You

Questions

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

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

" When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read 'Death of a Salesman.' I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" If you're an actor, go out and act. "

" 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. "