Simon McBurney
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Simon McBurney is a British actor, director, playwright, screenwriter, film producer, and theatre manager. Born in Cambridge on 25 August 1957, he holds United Kingdom citizenship and works primarily in the English language, taking on a range of creative roles across stage and screen rather than occupying any single fixed position in a production.
McBurney attended King's College School before going on to study at Peterhouse. He later trained at L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, adding specialist performance training to his academic background. That combination of formal education and dedicated theatre study laid the groundwork for a career spanning acting, directing, writing, and producing across multiple forms.
Over the course of his career McBurney has received several significant honours. He has been awarded Laurence Olivier Awards and the Europe Theatre Prize, as well as the Konrad Wolf Prize. He was also appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, a state honour recognising his contributions to the arts. As both a theatre director and a theatre manager, he has occupied roles on either side of the production process, and his work as a screenwriter and film producer extends his practice beyond the stage. The Europe Theatre Prize remains one of the concrete international recognitions attached to his name.
Quotes by Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney's insights on:
Every time I make, I’ve made a piece of work, I’ve wanted to get rid of it, obliterate it and do the next thing, because it was never quite what I wanted. I think the moment you think you’ve arrived is the moment that you should stop.
People expect the math to be simplified, but I want to surprise them right from the start. 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.
We live in an age where quantity is seen as preferable to quality, and many people tend to work in a horizontal line: next, next, next. But if you do that, you never investigate the vertical line – the depth of the piece.
Normally when people ask me what I do I say I’m an actor, and that’s what I always wanted to be and that’s the way I approach work even when I’m directing it.
As far as I’m concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn’t mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.
I mean I’m talking about playing games, about imagining other people, and it’s part of the way that it helps you actually see the world.
We live in an age where quantity is seen as preferable to quality, and many people tend to work in a horizontal line: next, next, next. But if you do that, you never investigate the vertical line - the depth of the piece.
Theatre artists are essentially sort of charlatans and thieves, I mean that's the tradition that we come from, so I have absolutely no, I make no bones about the fact that I steal from here and I take from there, and we all do it, that's perfectly all right, that's the nothing, there's nothing new in the world, there's nothing actually new in the way that you do something, but the point is is how do you take something and use it to articulate what is essentially a core of any given theatrical production.