Chat with Simon McBurney

Theater visionary and actor

About Simon McBurney

In 1992, during a rain-soaked rehearsal in a disused London warehouse, Simon McBurney and Complicite built a set from 300 suspended microphones—each wired to trigger fragments of voice, breath, and street noise as actors moved through space. That experiment became *The Street of Crocodiles*, a landmark in sonic dramaturgy where sound wasn’t accompaniment but architecture: shaping narrative, erasing borders between memory and reportage, turning silence into palpable texture. McBurney’s work refuses the hierarchy of image over ear; he treats acoustics as psychological cartography—recording the tremor in a Polish grandmother’s Polish accent for *Mnemonic*, or layering live Foley with pre-recorded archival radio for *The Encounter*. His direction insists that storytelling begins not in the script, but in the resonance chamber of the listener’s own body. This isn’t theater with sound—it’s theater *as* sound, calibrated for the age of fractured attention and deep listening.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Simon McBurney:

  • “How did recording Amazonian storytellers shape your approach to vocal rhythm in 'The Encounter'?”
  • “What made you abandon traditional blocking for microphone-triggered movement in 'Shun-kin'?”
  • “Why did you insist on live, unamplified whispering for the entire first act of 'Measure for Measure' at the Globe?”
  • “How do you rehearse actors to embody silence as precisely as speech?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is McBurney's 'listening rehearsal' technique?
McBurney begins every Complicite rehearsal with 20 minutes of guided auditory immersion—no speaking, no eye contact—focusing solely on layered ambient sounds, breath patterns, and subvocal shifts. He developed this after studying neurologist Oliver Sacks’ work on auditory perception, treating listening as a physical skill to be trained like muscle memory. The goal is to recalibrate performers’ nervous systems so they respond to acoustic cues before semantic ones, enabling real-time ensemble responsiveness.
Did McBurney really record his own heartbeat for 'The Encounter'?
Yes—he wore a medical-grade stethoscope mic for three days while traveling through the Amazon, capturing his pulse alongside indigenous guides’ oral histories. Those recordings formed the rhythmic backbone of the show’s binaural soundtrack. The heartbeat wasn’t metaphorical; it was used as a metronomic anchor during live performance, synced to actor movement via pressure-sensitive floor sensors.
How did McBurney's dyslexia influence his theatrical methodology?
He credits dyslexia with training him to parse narrative through spatial and sonic relationships rather than linear text. Early experiments involved mapping Shakespearean verse onto physical gestures and resonant frequencies—turning iambic pentameter into vibration patterns felt in the sternum. This led to Complicite’s signature 'scored text' system, where scripts are annotated with acoustic and kinetic instructions instead of traditional stage directions.
What role did BBC Radiophonic Workshop play in McBurney's early work?
In the late 1980s, McBurney collaborated with Workshop veterans Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson to adapt their analog tape-loop techniques for live theater. They built custom reel-to-reel rigs that allowed actors to manipulate sound in real time by spinning tapes with hand cranks—transforming dialogue into stuttering echoes or stretching vowels into drone fields. This became foundational for Complicite’s rejection of pre-recorded 'cues' in favor of performative sound-making.
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Topics

theateractordirectorstorytellingsound

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