If you were creating an Identikit theatre guru, he might be a little bit like
Simon McBurney. He’d probably wear a tatty old T-shirt with more holes than
cloth. His hair would be everywhere. He would be rearranging croissant
crumbs into very precise, neat lines on the café table. And his conversation
would be just this scattily brilliant, ranging improbably across cosmology,
“the functional equation of the Riemann zeta function” (nope, I don’t know
either), and our inextinguishable need for theatre, for “live experiences
that tell us about our place in the world”.
If anyone’s earned the right to play the boho genius, it’s McBurney. His
company Complicite are Britain’s pre-eminent stage artists of the past two
decades, with a prize-winning comedy pedigree and a string of life-affirming
total-theatre classics (The Street of Crocodiles, The Three Lives of Lucie
Cabrol, Mnemonic) to their name.
The part-time actor is now a globetrotting auteur, meeting me in Vienna the
morning after opening A Disappearing Number, his new play about Ramanujan,
the Indian mathematician, soon to come to the Barbican in London.
Other forthcoming engagements include working with Charlie (Being John
Malkovich) Kaufman on a movie and directing a Broadway revival of All My
Sons with James Gandolfini – which could be explosive: The Wall Street
Journal called for his deportation the last time he worked in New York, when
his Brecht revival, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (starring Al Pacino)
compared George Bush to Hitler.
It might not have helped that McBurney calls Complicite “a terrorist
organisation”. But, in person, there’s nothing insurrectionist about the
director, who would rather talk cosmic philosophy than politics. McBurney’s
father was an archaeologist and, growing up in 1960s Cambridge, the boy
Simon inherited a deep curiosity about where we come from and who we really
are. He launched Complicite after studying under Jacques Lecoq, the
legendary physical theatre sage, in Paris, where he met his co-founders
Marcello Magni and Annabel Arden. Within two years of the company’s
inception, they won the prestigious Perrier prize for comedy at the
Edinburgh Festival, in 1985. Now he runs the company himself.
I saw the Ramanujan show the previous evening; it’s a rich disquisition on
maths and identity, on love and loss. The show begins with a comically
complicated maths lecture on an upstage blackboard, and is soon spinning
infinite sequences of numbers into resonant metaphors for the journey of
life.
Did you know that 1 + 2 + 3 to infinity equals minus / ther – but that’s the
kind of mind-bending mathematical nugget to emerge from Ramanujan’s
correspondence with the Cambridge don G. H. Hardy.
The relationship between the two, which culminated in Ramanujan transgressing
his religious rules to travel to England in 1913, forms the basis of this
dreamlike play. The show interweaves the story of Ramanujan and Hardy with
the present-day story of a man (McBurney) and his maths lecturer partner.
She travels to India in Ramanujan’s footsteps and eventually dies. He follows,
to get closer to her ghost. Meanwhile, 100 years previously, Ramanujan is
travelling in the opposite direction, making the trip to England that
eventually kills him. Partition (as a maths concept) is paralelled
appositely with the partition of India and Pakistan, and diverging and
converging series in mathematics become a metaphor for the Indian diaspora.
McBurney is wrapped up in the new show’s strengths and failures, devising
improvements (between Vienna and London he has dropped out of the cast) and
chewing over the mathematical conundrums at its heart. He flatly denies that
maths is a tricky subject for theatre; that it’s hard to make formulae and
algorithms seem intelligible.
“I always felt maths was incredibly logical and certain, and I had a real
problem with it at school,” he says. “Then suddenly I discovered that, at
its sharp end, everything is uncertain and people are guessing all the
time.” McBurney’s current obsession is with “the imaginary number”, a
conceptual leap of faith within mathematics that enabled (among other
things) the discovery of electromagnetic waves, says McBurney – and
therefore computers and mobile phones. A Disappearing Number posits maths
as a creative act like poetry or painting, whose practitioners map the
infinite aspects of our universe.
What maths isn’t, says McBurney, is dry or abstract; it’s in the warp and weft
of Indian culture. “It’s written into the Vedas, it’s in the music. In
India, mathematics feels much more part of life.” But, wherever
mathematicians practise, says McBurney, “if they dig ever deeper into
mathematical reality, there will be something in there that brings them
suddenly back to earth”.
Ramanujan was a poor, untutored Brahmin whose work on number theory caught the
attention of Hardy at the turn of the 20th century. “He had no idea,” says
McBurney, “that his work would eventually be instrumental in devising a set
of physical laws to define everything.” That’s string theory, the holy grail
of maths.
This is very much Complicite territory: echoes through time, connections
across worlds. In McBurney’s hands, mathematical sequences become journeys
through life, and numerology a means of giving substance to the unknowable.
“Everybody lives with an idea of infinity and with the notion of death.
These two things dance around each other.”
He adds that the show partly confronts his sense of loss after the death in
2002 of the actress Katrin Cartlidge, star of Mnemonic and McBurney’s
close friend. “Sometimes I see her so clearly, and feel her so clearly. I’m
constantly asking myself: Where is she? How can someone simply not be there?
My work is about the wonder of those mysteries, from falling in love with
somebody to the void you feel when someone dies.”
Curiosity is the hallmark of great artists and McBurney has it in spades, yet
running Complicite, he says, “feels like a struggle”. Shows on this scale
cost too much money (“I long to make a show with just five chairs again”).
The pressure to live up to the company’s reputation is intense. He hates to
feel chained to the wheel of international theatre-making. “Somebody rang me
and asked, would I do an opera in the spring of 2012?” he grimaces. “I’m not
sure I’ll even be alive then.”
He also dreads criticism, especially of his vanity for appearing in his own
shows. “You do have to have a belief, akin to arrogance, in order to do
this,” he concedes. The safeguard against an overwhelming ego is that “I
have an in-built sense of doubt about what I’m doing. My confidence goes
easily. It’s a battle.”
The chat in theatre circles in recent years is that McBurney, like Peter
Brook, his fellow auteur, before him, is a frustrated filmmaker. He doesn’t
deny it: “I am drifting in that direction. I love acting in movies. It’s
like a kind of holiday. I’m not responsible for anything except what I do on
screen.”
He recently starred as a weaselly Foreign Office functionary in Kevin
Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland. He was script doctor,
improbably enough, on the recent Mr Bean movie. And now, he says, “if
somebody tomorrow said, ‘You’ve got five years of film work’, I’d go and do
it, just like that.” I don’t believe him: he’s a theatre man through and
through, as he himself presently admits. “Theatre is my family,” he says.
“In my work, I feel constantly that I’m looking for my home. But in fact,
being with all of the people who work with Complicite, that’s my home.”
There is a spiritual hankering to McBurney’s conversation and to his work. He
was never a sucker for conventional religion: “I remember as a child trying
to pray and wondering, ‘Why isn’t anything happening?’ I thought something
should happen. But I was once a bell-boy, carrying the incense. For me it
felt like going onstage.” That confusion – between the realm of the spirit
and of the stage – has never left him.
McBurney is fascinated by Ramanujan because his notes may lead to a theory
“that binds the very small and the very large together”. You could say he
aims to achieve the same in his work at Complicite.
A Disappearing Number will be at the Barbican from September 5 (020-7638
8891; www.barbican.org.uk)
