Simon McBurney on 'Watching Theatre'

“The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience. That audience looks collectively at what is going on on the stage and collectively imagines that this is real. ... But what is more fundamental is the notion that when everybody laughs together or, last night, when I heard people around me collectively sobbing, at that moment we are bound together not by our bodies sitting in the theater but by a collective imagination. At that moment we understand the lie that what we think is only our own, that our internal lives are only our own. At that point our collective imaginations become one imagination and my internal life becomes the same as your internal life, which is what Aristotle understood when he analyzed tragedy. It’s a collective act in which we collectively understand something about being a community together. The moment we understand that, feel it, we feel a kind of responsibility in which we must collectively help and take responsibility for each other. That is part of the definition of our humanity and, if you like, if it’s not a contradiction in terms, our animal humanity.”

New York Times; Sunday 26 October 2008

McBurney Back On Broadway

British director Simon McBurney, founder and A.D. of Complicite, will helm the second revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, opening on Broadway on October 2, 2008. McBurney was nominated for both the Tony and the Drama Desk awards in 1998 for his production of Ionesco’s The Chairs. John Lithgow will star as Joe Keller. Diane Wiest will reportedly play his wife, Kate Keller. There is also speculation that Katie Holmes will make her Broadway (and professional stage) debut, playing the part of a woman who visits her former neighbors and the family of a missing pilot she once loved. The actress has committed to taking part in a private workshop of the play in May. I’ve seen McBurney do some miraculous things on stage, but making the third Mrs. Tom Cruise a competent stage actress should be one of his greatest challenges.