FESTIVAL THEATRE | Simon McBurney
PHOTO © CHLOE COURTNEY
How would you describe the process of adapting the book for the stage? It’s not dissimilar to a birth in the sense that you have the body of the book to use, then you grow a kind of extraordinary placenta around it of all sorts of bits and pieces, and you grow a thing within that, which is different to the book. Very gradually, you detach yourself completely from the book and form a new work of art.
Was it important to detach your piece from the book it was based on? [All works of art] detach themselves little by little from life, or an inspiration from life, or they form part of a continuity, a line of different things, and they’re not separate. Nothing is a separate thing, although we tend to view them as such. We tend to view them as separate paintings on walls and separate books between covers, but they are all interlinked with what has come and what is happening afterwards. It seems like there’s very much a sense of you and your engagement with the material in this solo show. Were you important in its creation? Yes, I think that the engagement with the book forms part of the drama as well as the book itself. When you say it’s a solo show, I will be with the audience and for me, in any case, it is the audience who, in my mind, or rather in their minds, create the show they’re watching. It is ultimately formed in [their] imaginations. It’s the audience who choose to see or not see truth within it; who are amused, moved, engaged, drawn in or bored, but it is their minds and engagement that ultimately complete the process of creation.
Would you, therefore, describe the play as ‘incomplete’ until it’s been viewed by an audience? It’s a bit like asking the famous question of when is a painting i nished, to which the reply has frequently been ‘only when it’s looked at’. That could equally well be seen as a rather thinly veiled excuse for the fact that maybe the piece I will present in Edinburgh won’t be i nished… and it’s quite a daunting thought because I have
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never played the International Festival before. Normally when I make a piece, I work quite a lot with the audience. I take it around and discover what happens, and it shapes and changes, and when I feel it has sufi cient strength then [I] can show it to other people.
The participation of the audience links back to the idea of interconnection. Is that a key theme of this work? Yes and I think the word ‘interconnection’ is important, within the context of this piece, because that is actually a scene of the [play]. A man, who comes from a culture, which separates constantly, [and] sees the world in very binary terms, encounters a culture which doesn’t see the world in that way whatsoever, and yet the is culture under threat. You encounter him not only in the third person, but through his own voice, and that’s very important because we are all him. That is our point of view, and everything outside of that is the other, but nobody is the other in this world, because we are all interconnected. One person’s culture can’t be separated from another person’s culture. Time is a key concept within this piece, why does it play such a big part? They [the people of the Javari Valley] conceive of time in a fundamentally different structure, to the way that we see it, and perhaps, after speaking to [Oxford University Professor] Marcus du Sautoy, they’re actually closer to a truer vision of what time actually is, because we know so very little about it. The way that these people see time is that past time runs parallel to present time. Whether these people are right in their view of time or not, their belief signals an entirely different view of the world and our interconnection with it. Or a sense of very profound interconnection, which perhaps we have lost.
The Encounter, EICC, 473 2000, 8–23 Aug (not 11–13, 18), 7.30pm (8–10, 16–17, 19, 21–22) & 2.30pm (14, 15, 20, 23), £32 (£16). Preview 7 Aug, 7.30pm, £15 (£7.50).