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" The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen. "
Simon McBurney
Way
Mystery
Music
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" In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world. "
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" 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. "
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" Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone. "
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" 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. "
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" The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it. "
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" Most people won't order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic. "
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" I suppose I'm really interested in theatre that provides an intensity of experience on another level. "
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" I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong. "
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" 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. "
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" I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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?' "
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