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.
Simon McBurneyUltimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.
Simon McBurneyTheatre 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.
Simon McBurneyAs 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.
Simon McBurneyWhen you make something, if you are a painter or a writer, a degree, or a sculptor or whatever or a musician, a degree of energy is required to make it, and I'm not sure that it is always aggressive, but when you have a great deal of energy it can appear to be more aggressive than it is. In fact, I mean you can talk about a waterfall being aggressive, but in fact it is just a very powerful forward movement of energy, and although I think sometimes my engine house is a kind of anger.
Simon McBurney