"if you just sit on stage and do nothing, something will happen..."

Complicite: Origins, influences and early work

“I think of all theatre as music”, contends McBurney quoted in Igor Tornonyi-Lalic’s review (The Times, 13/11/2010). Oliver Jones would certainly agree with that as he has described Complicite’s/National Theatre’s Olivier production of Measure for Measure as a “continuous, cinematic orchestral score” (ctd. in Holland 326). Christina Patterson interviewing McBurney

 quotes Arthur Miller’s daughter Rebecca who upon seeing McBurney’s directing of All my Sons she said she’d never had “so many cathartic spine-tingling moments”. In the same interview, McBurney admits “I might be like a conductor, I collect the stuff together ... I find that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.” When he has a text that is not dramatic, “It’s chaos. The first thing you’ve got to do is put a bomb under it, or take to a halt and do something else.” (ibid.)

Its explosive physicality is part of its stagecraft, in itself “a form of authorship” director Pierre Audi suggests in a profile of the company in ‘across the universe’ theatre online forum

 where Simon’s brother Gerard, a conductor and music theorist, is also quoted: “Simon is a real theatre animal. I wouldn’t say he is intellectual. He smells his way into a piece, that is my experience of him, he will kind of stalk the rehearsal room and sniff his way into the text.” According to Tom Morris, formerly associate director at the National Theatre, McBurney uses the actors’ bodies as Shakespeare used text, as “imaginative triggers to release an image or memory capsule into the audience’s mind”.  (ibid.) The Complicite ethos is painstakingly and obsessively obsessed with visualizing and physicalizing every atom of the story. The name of this anarchic and nomadic company, (Theatre de) Complicite, itself encapsulates the visual and physical complicity between performers themselves and the audience: 

Complicité in French doesn’t have quite the pejorative meaning it does in English 

though I like the idea that it’s a partnership in an illegal action, that there is something wicked about it. It’s meant in the sense that when the audience watch the actors the sense of relationship between the actors on stage might be so intimate that with a bit of luck the audience might whisper to one another in the middle of the show:  ‘I bet they’re fucking each other’. (ibid.)

In his first show Put it On your Head (1983) with Fiona Gordon, they sat on deck chairs doing nothing for an hour-and-a-half in “an outrageously slapstick, largely non-verbal exploration of seaside etiquette [which] was played to small venues around Europe” (ibid.). As McBurney confesses: “I had a teacher who said that if you just sit on stage and do nothing, something will happen” (ibid.). His second show in late 1983 in England was about death, a very funny show indeed, and then More Bigger Snacks Now, “a satire of the greed and junk culture of Thatcherism, inspired by a Steve Bell cartoon”.  (ibid.) According to Igor Tornonyi-Lalic “McBurney and his Complicite troupe is the kind of company that can inject soul into a plank of wood. How? By exploiting almost every cut of theatrical and dramatic meat that’s available to them. Puppetry, shadow play, farce, constructivist videos ... the way to this freewheeling virtuosity was the usual brutal barrage of Complicite workshops.” (The Times, 13/11/2010).

Among his major influences McBurney acknowledges that of the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Mitter and Shevtsova point out the two Meyerholdian principles at play: (i) the internal outwardly, i.e. exteriorizing the interiority combining fantasy and theatricality; (ii) “a self-aware acting that generates humour, irony and reflexivity regarding the material or how it is performed.” (203). They go on to observe that apart from these principles Complicite references both ancient Greek and Shakespearean theatre. From these theatres it has developed its own symbolist sensibilities to underscore the surface structures of its theatrical projection, and a measure of economy and stylization which offers not only distilled imagery of larger more complicated phenomena but also implicates the audience. As already pointed out, the audience needs to be engaged so as to fill in and draw the necessary inferences to disambiguate or decipher what is often cryptically or ambiguously suggested on stage. Meyerhold was of course the first to make use of machine-like moving structures with platforms and whirling wheels, and his Biomechanics aimed at training the actors’ bodies so that they can also form dynamic, pulsating images, moving in unison and integrated with the rhythmic movement of Popova’s constructivist structures. (Braun 170) In addition to these Meyerholdean echoes, Complicite is also strongly influenced by the German dance-theatre director Pina Bausch, especially in that “movement is not primarily a matter of technique, virtuosity, or shape and image, but is a process through which human beings discover each other and themselves.” (Mitter and Shevtsova 174). Mitter and Shevtsova trace a number of borrowings from Bausch such as “underscor[ing] events with sound, musical or otherwise, instead of interpreting or illustrating them in any narratorial or psychological way”. (174) 

Furthermore McBurney’s own directorial style, following Mitter and Shevtsova, can be linked back to Russian director Lev Dodin’s “aliveness [...] which activates [the actors’] growth and sparks off a chain reaction from actor to actor to spectator” (201). It is an infectious and catalytic style in the sense that  it “prompt[s] actors to ‘dig’ through the layers of their existence - memories and subconscious experiences included ” (202)

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McBurney also draws on Peter Brook’s theatre languages at the core of which is the notion that “a play is play” (Mitter and Shevtsova 100). This aptly applies to McBurney whose approach also involves understanding the text not semantically but listening to the rhythmic patterns of the words and making sounds in search of the impulses behind the words. This is of course reminiscent of “Ted Hughes’s attempt [in Orghast] to fashion a universal language that would communicate by using the relationship between sound and emotion rather than words and meaning.” (ibid.). 

In addition, Complicite’s approach regularly incorporates object theatre, puppetry, music, film, video and electronic devices into his theatre pieces, conducting a veritable symphony of human and physical elements inspired by his teacher Lecoq and his pedagogy. Lecoq (and Brook) privileged practices of the ensemble, multi-headed story-telling, embodied lightness and disponibilité, complicitous play, journeying from motion to emotion, a corrosive and celebratory laughter, the creative agency of spectators, engaging with tempo, rhythm, musicality and the dynamics of space, some of the elements of a performance poetics as summarized by David Williams (Mitter and Shevtsova eds 248). 

Still, McBurney (1999) insists that there is no common approach to the company’s productions other than a flexing and toning of ‘the muscle of the imagination’ in search of ‘a moment of collective imagining’ (71). Recent projects tend to address topics of history, science, music and mathematics with a sense of wonder, always exploring—both physically and metaphysically—how we can remain connected in a dehumanizing technological world. According to David Williams all these varying aesthetics and dramaturgies combined with the filmic polyrhythms and modalities, as well as the critical intelligence of John Berger’s fiction, produce a unique contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk: “Within this synchronic form, the creative agency of performers and their bodies comprises the very foundation for a compassionate celebration of the extraordinary in the everyday and the marginalized, and an articulate humanist enquiry into a ‘politics of the imagination’ (McBurney 22).” (249-50)

Such a Gesamtkunstwerk would be impossible without that sharp trademark ‘devising reflex’ of this company; ensemble devising is a modus operandi or a mode of enquiry, but also a key component in Complicite’s poetics.