Simon McBurney, United Kingdom  
(Actor, writer, theater director and co-founder of Théâtre de Complicité)

Half a mile from Cyrenaica, in northern Libya, is a large stone shelter. 80 meters wide and 20 meters high. In the local dialect it is called Hauh Fteah. In 1951, dating analysis with 14C showed that the site had been occupied by humans continuously for at least 100,000 years. Among the artifacts unearthed was a bone whistle that was 40 to 70 thousand years old. As a child, when I heard this, I asked my father:

- What, did they have music back then?

He smiled at me.

- Like all human communities.

He was an American archaeologist specializing in prehistory, the first to dig at Hauh Fteah, in Cyrenaica.

I am very honored and happy to be Europe's representative at World Theatre Day this year.

In 1963, my predecessor, the great Arthur Miller, said that the threat of nuclear war weighs heavily on this world. "In an age when diplomacy and politics have terribly weak and limited means, the delicate and sometimes distant impact of the work of art must shoulder the heavy burden of maintaining the ties between people, of maintaining the community."„

The word „drama” is derived from the Greek „Dran”, which means „to do”… and the word „theater” comes from the Greek „Theatron”, which literally means „place to see”. A place where we don’t just watch, but where we see, receive, understand. 2400 years ago, Polycletus the Younger designed the great theater of Epidaurus. With a capacity of 14,000 people, the extraordinary acoustics of this open-air space are a miracle. A lit matchstick in the center of the stage can be heard from all 14,000 seats. As was the custom in Greek theater, when you watched the actors, you could also see the landscape behind them. This not only brought together many aspects of the Greek world, the community, the theater and the natural world, but at the same time brought all the eras together. As the play evoked the myths in the present tense, you could look beyond the stage to what was to be the ultimate future. Nature.

One of the most surprising revelations of the reconstruction of London's Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's theatre, is also about what you see. That revelation is light. Both the stage and the auditorium are illuminated. The performers and the audience can see each other. All the time. Everywhere you look, you see people. And one of the consequences is that we are reminded that the great soliloquies, of Hamlet or Macbeth, for example, were not simply private meditations, but public debates.

We live in an age where it is difficult to see clearly. We are surrounded by more fiction than at any other time in history or prehistory. Any „fact” can be contested, any anecdote can claim to draw attention to the „truth.” One fiction in particular surrounds us constantly. The one that seeks to separate us. From truth. And from each other. That we are separate. People from people. Women from men. Human beings from nature.

But just as we live in an age of division, of fragmentation, so too we live in a time of immense movement. More than at any other time in history, the world is on the move, often running, walking, swimming if necessary, migrating, all over the world. And this is just the beginning. The response, as we well know, has been to close borders. To build walls. To exclude. To isolate. We live in a tyrannical world order, in which indifference is the currency of exchange, and hope is the contraband. And part of this tyranny is the control not only of space but also of time. The time we live in avoids the present. It focuses on the recent past and the near future. I don't have that. I'll buy it.

Now I bought it, I need the next… thing. The deep past is obliterated. The future without consequences.

Many say that theater doesn't or can't change any of this. But theater won't go away. Because theater is a place, I'm tempted to say a refuge. Where people come together and instantly form communities. As we always have. All theaters are the size of the first human communities, from 50 to 14,000 souls. From a nomadic caravan to a third of ancient Athens.

And because theater exists only in the present, it also defies this disastrous view of time. The present moment is always the subject of theater. Its meanings are constructed in a communal act between performer and audience. Not just here, but now. Without the performer's act, the audience could not believe. Without the audience's belief, the performance would not be complete. We laugh at the same time. We are moved. We sigh or are shocked into silence. And in that moment, through drama, we discover the deepest truth: what we thought was the most intimate division between us, the boundary of our own individual consciousness, is also borderless. It is something we share.

And they cannot stop us. Every night, we will reappear. Every evening, the actors and the spectators will gather and the same drama will be reenacted. Because, as the writer John Berger says, „the sense of ritual return is deeply embedded in the nature of theater,” which is why it has always been the art form of the dispossessed, who, because of this dismantling of our world, are all of us. Wherever there are actors and spectators, there will be stories that cannot be told anywhere else, whether in the operas and theaters of the great cities, or in the immigrant and refugee camps of northern Libya and around the world. We will always be together, a collective, in this reenactment.

And if we were in Epidaurus, we could see how we share this with a much larger landscape. How we are always part of nature and we cannot escape from it, just as we cannot escape from our planet. If we were in the Globe Theatre, we would see how seemingly private questions are addressed to us all. And if we held the Cyrenaican whistle from 40,000 years ago, we would understand that the past and the present are indivisible, and the chain of human community can never be broken by tyrants and demagogues.

Translation: Ligia Soare

Biography – Simon McBurney, United Kingdom

Peter Brook:„"British theatre has a fine and distinguished tradition. Simon McBurney and complicated "They are not part of it; they created their own tradition, that's why they are so special and valuable."”

Actor, writer and director Simon McBurney is one of the most innovative, unpredictable and influential theatre creators working today. He is the co-founder of the company complicated (formerly Théâtre de Complicité) was founded in London in 1983. Since then, he has worked with the same designers, producers, stage managers, actors, writers (including an intimate collaboration of 25 years with the writer John Berger, who passed away in 2017), to create through a meticulously studied collaborative process that combines a deep fascination with language with the belief that all aspects of theatre should speak.

Whether he is working on original works, adaptations for theater, opera or film, or reinventing classics on Broadway, he always defies the limits of theatrical form.

In addition to writing and creating original works, he not only staged the plays of distinguished authors – Beckett, Brecht, Bulgakov, Durrenmatt, Ionesco, Daniil Kharms, Arthur Miller, Bruno Schulz, Shakespeare and Ruzzante – but also adapted numerous literary works. He adapted, for example, The Master and Margarita (2012), the centerpiece of the 2012 Avignon Festival, where it was Associated Artists of the year; among recent adaptations, we mention Beware of Pity (2016), which he also directed, in collaboration with Schaubühne Ensemble in Berlin.

Over the past 20 years, he has consistently revisited political, social and philosophical questions about how we live, think and act as a society. Complex ideas are explored and revealed through the use of a surprising theatricality that is not afraid to mix the oldest theatrical forms with the latest aspects of modern technology.

Mnemonic (1999-2004), a play about the relationship between memory, origin, and identity, allowed him to develop his fascination with spirit and consciousness. He took the story of Oetzi, the body found in 1991 in a glacier on the border between Italy and Austria and who, according to scientists, lived 5,000 years ago, and combined it with a contemporary personal story of loss and depression. He has continued to explore these themes in various ways in recent years, most recently in The Encounter, a commission from the Edinburgh International Festival, in 2015.

The Encounter is currently touring Europe in a new version and is, at the same time, an installation, a philosophical meditation on the nature of consciousness, and a cry of disapproval against the colonial pretensions of modern consumer society. The piece raises questions about political, social, and formal issues of what it means to be human today.

It combines the oldest of theatrical forms, simple narration, with contemporary technology – using binaural sound directly connected to each spectator through individual headphones.

But the focus is never on technology, but on the fundamental questions McBurney asks about consciousness and the way Western society "thinks," and reminds us that we must listen to those on the margins of our world if we are to survive.

A similar encounter of rigorous intellectual investigation and stunning theatrical form was the play Disappearing Number (2007), written by McBurney and inspired by A Mathematician's Apology by GH Hardy, which told the story of the relationship between mathematician Hardy and Srinivasa Ramnujan, the greatest Indian mathematician of the 20th century. Integrating complex mathematics into the form of the entire performance, it wove a story that combined cultural identity, love and mortality with an exploration of mathematical beauty, realized through classical Indian dance, musical form and video projection.

Cultural identity and how the mind works were also central themes in the works created together with the Setagaya Public Theater in Tokyo. The first,The Elephant Vanishes, was adapted from a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. The second was an adaptation of two works by Junichiro Tanizaki: The Story of Shunkin, a short story about a blind Shamisen player from the 19th century and In Praise of Shadows, an essay on aesthetics. Both pieces, one set in modern Tokyo, the other combining a radio station in Kyoto and early 19th-century Japan, blend form and content to ask crucial questions for the Japanese, and for all cultures in general, about the relationship between the present and the past, while challenging Western ideas about perception and beauty. And the understanding that, just as words form the basis of our conscious minds, so music reveals and appeals to our deepest unconscious.

The emphasis on the "musicality" of the theater is evident from the very beginning of its activity. Not only in the use of music, but also in the very form of the plays that it calls original music.

This musicality was particularly evident in The Street of Crocodiles, based on the creations of Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, who was inspired by Alfred Schnittke's first Concerto Grosso. The Noise of Time, created in collaboration with the Emerson Quartet and Lincoln Center in New York, used Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 5 as its central text. The piece integrated theater and music in a completely new way, with the quartet memorizing this extraordinary work in order to move with the actors throughout the performance.

This led to the collaboration with the LA Philharmonic in the first season of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, with Strange Poetry, a meditation on Berlioz, using the entire orchestra as performers. Since then, he has worked on operas in collaboration with De Nederlaandse Opera in Amsterdam.

A Dog's Heart (2010), a new opera by Sasha Raskatov, was followed by The Magic Flute (2012) andThe Rake's Progress (2017) by Stravinsky.

McBurney's creations and those of the company of which he is artistic director have been said not only to have produced a real earthquake effect in British theatre over the past 30 years, but to have had a worldwide influence. Among the numerous awards, it is worth mentioning the prestigious Award Yomiuri (2011) which is awarded in Japan, McBurney being the first foreigner to receive it. It was Associated Artists of the Avignon Festival (2012) and received honorary doctorates from several universities, including Lund, Sweden, London Metropolitan University and Cambridge University.