McBurney Meets Miller
The acclaimed British experimentalist stretches an American classic to new dimensions
By Carol Rocamora
“Over the last 20 years I have seen thousands of productions in the theatre, but it is the images from Complicite shows that are branded on my brain.”
So wrote Lyn Gardner, theatre critic of the U.K.’s Guardian, about Complicite, the unique London-based company that has dazzled international audiences with its innovative theatre creations for more than two decades.
Under the artistic direction of the British director and actor Simon McBurney, the company’s 51-year-old co-founder, Complicite is a continually evolving ensemble of performers and collaborators. Its body of work—more than 30 productions, a number of which have toured throughout the world—range from theatrical adaptations of prose texts to revivals of classical drama to entirely devised original pieces. In recognition of his work with the company, McBurney was honored with an OBE—an Officer of the Order of the British Empire award—in 2005.
Complicite’s classics have ranged from The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure to The Visit, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Chairs, all performed in a variety of London venues. But it is the bringing to life of obscure prose texts, often in striking combinations, that is the company’s signature, providing those indelible theatre images that have astonished British and American critics alike. New York audiences were first treated to Complicite’s The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, based on the writings of London-born author John Berger about survival in Europe’s turbulent 20th century, performed at the Lincoln Center Festival in 1996. Next, they saw The Street of Crocodiles (a 1998 revival of a 1992 production), inspired by the writings of Polish author Bruno Schulz. Then came The Noise of Time (2000), Complicite’s meditation on the life of Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich; and the astonishing Mnemonic (on tour in 2001)—a so-called “collision” of the writings of Konrad Spindler, Benoit Mandelbrot (the inventor of fractal geometry) and others—about the discovery of the 5,300-year-old Bolzano ice man and the connection of contemporary man with his past.
Most recently, Complicite evoked images of our ultra-consumerist society in The Elephant Vanishes (2003–04), based on the stories of Haruki Murakami, at Lincoln Center, and it is likely that U.S. audiences will soon see A Disappearing Number, about mathematics and identity, which won the Olivier Award for best new play in London this year and is now touring Europe and Australia. With the exception of The Winter’s Tale and The Visit, all of the above productions were directed by McBurney, who also appeared as an actor in Mnemonic.
Much has been written about McBurney’s facility at bringing text (both dramatic and prose) to life, a process that has become Complicite’s trademark. “I don’t like the word ‘style,’” says McBurney, who prefers to talk about the company’s “approach,” which manifests itself in a unique fusion of storytelling, physical movement, and visual and sound elements. The origin of the approach lies in the training of the company’s founders—McBurney, Annabel Arden and Marcello Magni were all students of Jacques Lecoq in Paris, studying mime, improvisation and commedia dell’arte at his International Theatre School. “There I saw theatre from everywhere,” McBurney says. “Much of our time would be spent attempting to understand each other and each other’s ideas. Our task became to create a common language, something that still forms one of the first steps in any production I embark upon. How do you understand each other? How can you find a language for what is often beyond language?”
Above all, Lecoq taught the trio to explore together—hence the founders’ choice in 1983 of their new company’s name (until 2000 it was known as Théâtre de Complicité, a francophone nod to their mentor), implying a sly collusion that takes place among the performers during the process and ultimately with the audience in performance. “There is no Complicite method—what is essential is collaboration, and a turbulent forward momentum,” McBurney avows. He describes his rehearsal room as stocked with all kinds of research documents, games and media equipment, with which the collaborating performers interact and improvise. “The room is crammed full of stuff—pictures, text, photographs, videos, objects, clothes and paper everywhere. But sometimes we reach a moment when there must be nothing in the room at all—it has to be bare, empty and uncluttered. Nothing is off limits,” he adds, “except not turning up.” As for the rehearsal period, McBurney describes it as a “process of collective imagining,” and speaks of the ensemble as a “multi-headed storyteller, swarming as one multiple organism, like a flock of starlings.”
McBurney, who also acknowledges the influence of the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the German dance-theatre director Pina Bausch and his British colleague Peter Brook (whose notion that “a play is play” aptly describes McBurney’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. Still, he insists that there is no common theme to the company’s productions. Recent ones 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.
Indeed, “connectedness” seems to characterize many of those memorable images in Complicite productions that have captivated critics and audiences. I shall never forget a puppet transforming into a living child in the The Causasian Chalk Circle, or actors scaling the theatre walls from floor to ceiling in The Street of Crocodiles, or a blackboard coming alive with mathematical formulae in A Disappearing Number, or a broken chair taking the shape of a human body in Mnemonic. Critic Ben Brantley described that production’s final image in the New York Times as “one splendid minute that—mind you—could occur only in the theatre…. I’ll recall this particular image for the rest of my life.”
McBurney has “irrevocably changed the face of British theatre,” says another critic, John O’Mahony of the Guardian. Now, directing the current revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons on Broadway, McBurney may be changing the face of American theatre, too.
When Eric Falkenstein decided to produce All My Sons this year, he consulted with Rebecca Miller as to choice of director, since this would be the first posthumous production on Broadway of a play by her father. Based on a true event, the play tells the story of an American manufacturer, Joe Keller, who sells faulty cylinder heads to the Air Force during World War II, with tragic results to both American soldiers and his family. (When it premiered in 1947, the 32-year-old playwright famously vowed that if it failed, he planned “to find some other line of work.” It won him the first Tony Award ever granted to a playwright.)
Miss Miller has always admired McBurney’s work, and knew that her father had, too. So she urged Falkenstein to approach McBurney, who had met Arthur Miller in 2001 and expressed a wish to direct his work one day. (This would not be the first production that McBurney has directed in New York independent of his London company—he supervised Brecht’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui for the National Actors Theatre in 2002, with a cast including Steve Buscemi, Billy Crudup, Charles Durning, John Goodman, Al Pacino, Chazz Palminteri and Tony Randall.)
McBurney approached the new assignment with characteristic intensity, applying the Complicite approach to the Miller text. He assembled his impressive cast, including John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest, Patrick Wilson, Katie Holmes and Christian Camargo, without the conventional audition process. He added five nonspeaking roles to the play, increasing the company to 15 members. This past May, long before rehearsals, he led the leading actors and several supporting cast members in a weeklong series of workshops, featuring games, exercises and improvisations, to begin building an acting company with a common language. Rehearsals for the production itself were six weeks instead of the usual four, and the entire company was called every day, all day. “He wanted us to look at Miller with different eyes,” says Camargo.
And so they did. The production opened on Oct. 16, stripped of all the realistic trappings of the Keller backyard that has typified past productions. Audiences see a bare stage, with only a fleeting suggestion of a house on the upstage scrim. The yard features nothing but a broken tree, a chair, a doorframe upstage center and the suggestion of side fences. The audience sees the actors sitting in the empty wings waiting for their entrances and exits. Time and place are announced by lead actor Lithgow, and scene changes are indicated on the upstage scrim, where film projections show scenes of the Keller factory and World War II battles. The “Neighbors,” a group of non-speaking actors, appear from time to time as witnesses to the explosive events.
Memorable images from this production join the list of others directed by McBurney—a violent, heart-wrenching fight between father and son, a convocation of neighbors in silent judgment of Keller’s actions, and the final, stirring video images representing what Miller calls “the universe of people outside” the play (and the theatre) for whom we are all responsible, characters and audience alike.
McBurney was commuting between New York and London during previews of All My Sons, remounting A Disappearing Number at the Barbican (to be followed by an international tour) and preparing for Shun–kin, the upcoming Complicite co-production with the Setagaya Public Theatre that will open in London next month and Tokyo in March. (He is also a busy film actor whose recent credits include Body of Lies and The Duchess.) Still, two days after the play opened, he continued to speak about what matters to him so deeply: Arthur Miller’s play, the production, and his work with the actors.
Carol Rocamora: How did it happen that you met Arthur Miller?
Simon McBurney: In 2001, he came to see Mnemonic in New York twice, and I was introduced to him. We went out to supper at Cafe Luxembourg. I was quite intimidated. I had been deeply moved by Death of a Salesman and All My Sons when I was a teenager in the late ’70s. The plays really resonated with me, as did the characters. At the time, what struck me most was his idea of “failure”—that at the heart of his plays he deals with many characters who have a deep sense of failure, and he does so in a way that is deeply poetic. So for me, he was a sort of mythical character, a Titan. I hadn’t expected to meet him, let alone have him come see my work. I asked Inge Morath [Miller’s wife]: “Did he enjoy it?” and she replied: “He turned to me at the end of Mnemonic and said: “Only theatre can do this.” So I felt emboldened to talk to him.
What did you talk about?
We talked about many different issues, including carpentry, and I loved the fact that for him his carpentry was as important as his playwriting. The idea of a playwright that interested him most was that the word is “play-wright,” not “play-write.” In other words, it’s a craft. He talked about the problem of having his plays done in America, how there has always been a tension, one that I’m aware of, too. (He didn’t say what kind of tension, so I’m analyzing it myself.) I think it’s because there is a huge concern in his plays—a criticism, if you like—about 20th-century American society, and a suggestion that America, especially in its heartland, refuses to criticize or look at itself, as if that’s somehow almost un-American. The sense I got from talking to him is that there may still be an “unspoken” Committee on Un-American Activities—I began to see it myself watching the election while we were rehearsing All My Sons, in the patriotic rhetoric, in the effort of each candidate to define himself as more American than the other, in Sarah Palin saying that she wanted to find “the real America” in the small towns, as if everyone else were not an American. My conversation with Arthur Miller led to my saying: “One day I hope I will have the opportunity to do one of your plays,” and he said: “I would love that, because when people do my plays in America they are conventional about the staging and frequently the plays are hampered by the heavy hand of naturalism.”
What is your view of “naturalism”?
We have to be very clear when we talk about naturalism in the theatre. It’s a stylistic choice, and it’s a deadly one for the theatre. Naturalism is a style developed in the ’40, ’50 and ’60s, that supposedly comes from the Stanislavsky approach—but that is to misunderstand Stanislavsky. Naturalism is not suited to the theatre because theatre is about communication with the audience. In the end the only question in the theatre is: How does it become alive? In fact, theatre only exists in the mind of the audience—it doesn’t exist on stage, or in a play. It only exists because the audience brings it alive.
I saw kabuki theatre in Japan, where, in a given scene, weeping takes place on stage in an extraordinarily stylized form. I was transfixed, looking along the row of faces alongside of me and watching how everyone in the audience was weeping, too. The emotion at that moment on stage was real, in the same way as when Don Giovanni is led down to hell and he sings his last act of defiance. The emotion of that moment is also real—it’s heightened, it’s extreme, but it is completely real. Reality in the theatre is created by actors, and it occurs only at that moment—which is why you will find actors saying “we had a good night” or “oh, tonight wasn’t so good.” What actors really mean is that they have found that point of communication, so you can have a great production and you can go and see it and it won’t mean anything to you at all if this moment of connection between actors and audience doesn’t happen. Equally, I have seen pieces of street theatre that are rough and appallingly overacted or rude—and yet I’ve been deeply moved by them. Sometimes, even with terrible performances, actors find a way to communicate with an audience. That’s why theatre can’t work on video. It’s the audience who creates theatre. It’s an imaginative act on the part of the audience. And that is theatre’s appeal, that’s why theatre continues.
Everyone thought theatre would die with the appearance of cinema, just as everyone thought painting would die with the appearance of photography. But all photography did was to liberate painting to be itself. Without photography, we would not have Picasso or Rothko. Painting would still be trying to do what photography can do much better. We need painting to do what happened on the walls of caves eons ago—to record what we deeply feel, and the complexity of what we feel and imagine. In the same way, film has liberated theatre to be itself. Without film, we wouldn’t have Jacques Copeau, who gave rise to Antonin Artaud. We wouldn’t have the plays of Beckett or Pinter. So in the theatre, what you do is to create the language to communicate with the audience on that night in that moment.
How does this insight relate to your work on All My Sons?
We began with the words on the page. The first thing I did was to strip away the stage directions that were not there in the original script and look at Miller’s very first version. “The backyard of the Keller home in the outskirts of an American town. August of our era.” It’s so resonant, so poetic, the place where the play literally starts. And I asked: “Why does he say ‘in the outskirts’; why does he say ‘August of our era’? When you read those words you realize that he’s looking for a place that does not have an exact address. It’s a place that represents a possible family within this society, in this country, in this time, any time after World War II within the society that has been created over the last few hundred years. So what Miller is doing is immediately invoking or creating a theatrical metaphor. And the power of the metaphor is that this place will become specific in the minds of the audience. So when it came to All My Sons, we decided to start only with the words that Miller gave us and not look at additional stage directions.
It’s fascinating, because as you begin to read it, every line has a resonance, and suggests more than it is. Miller originally made 700 pages of notes and reduced them to a 70-page play. He was a young playwright, looking for a powerful theatrical metaphor—a heightened image, an essentialized image of a possible situation. It’s not a real family—the Keller family didn’t exist—but they can become real for that audience. And so our aim—the actors, the design team and myself—was simply to raise up the level of the play to the stature of Miller’s writings, to the scale of it, the height of it, as opposed to reducing it yet another naturalistic sitting room or garden drama or melodrama.
Did you make any discoveries about the play along the way?
I treated the text as if it were Shakespeare, with the same respect. Everything grows out of the text. My interest is to begin with words, and respect every word and pause Miller has written. If you strip the excess props and stage directions accumulated over the years, all is revealed in its naked form. There is an extraordinary use of language—spare and essential, an incredible simplicity of a kind you won’t see anywhere else in English. You have sequences of lines, for example, at the end of the second act—
CHRIS: Mother, Mother…
MOTHER: Wait, wait…
CHRIS: How long? How long?
MOTHER: Till he comes; forever and ever till he comes!
You can see that Miller is not in the least bit interested in naturalism, but rather the heightened expression of deep, deep emotion.
Can you talk about some of your innovations—such as the use of video, and introduction of non-speaking roles, as embodied by the “Neighbors”?
In my conversation with Miller, he talked about how all his characters have a hinterland. For example, in Death of a Salesman, [Willy Loman] goes far away into a fantasy world or a dreamland. In All My Sons, the characters drift back into the past. It’s difficult because the speeches are exposition, and you have people living in their memories. So instead, you bring the past into the present. By bringing other people [the Neighbors] on stage, it becomes about a broader society. That’s my suggestion with the videos, too—that you get this sense of another world coming into focus and going away. For example, there is the powerful absence of the Keller son, Larry, and of the world of war and industry of that time—they are remote to us today. People don’t know what a P-40 is, and so the videos bring all this into reality for the audience.
How do you see the relevance of play today?
The play is largely about society. In mass-consumer capitalism, one of the great selling points is the invention of the nuclear family. Every family needs a fridge, a car, a house, a garden, a lawnmower, a radio, television, toaster, mixer and so on. That’s the idea. You don’t share with your neighbors. Everyone lives on their own. So the question at the heart of the play is: How do you exercise your sense of responsibility to your fellow human beings? Now, increasingly, we ask how we as human beings can sit in New York and London and say: Our families matter, but the ones in Iraq don’t, because they look funny and they speak another language and they don’t have fridges. The questions Arthur Miller asked in 1947 are articulated by Chris at the end of Act 1. He says it feels wrong to come out of a war and buy things and live a better life because you know it comes from human sacrifice. It’s like Bush saying today: “Go shopping.” This resonates in Miller’s play, and relates to what I was saying earlier about naturalism. Instead of setting the play in the kitchen among the appliances and objects of consumer capitalism, Miller deliberately sets it outside. We don’t see the car or any other objects; he sets it in a garden with an apple tree (as in the Old Testament). The message is simple: He’s asking us to consider human decision and action at their most elemental. Do we have within us the capacity for moral choice? What happens when you strip away the lies around us, and challenge the kind of fiction that this mass-consumer society produces? You open a more profound conflict—between father and son. All the basic structures that hold us together—namely family—are undermined by the values of this society. So the question remains: How do you take responsibility? What obligation do we have for making the money we make and how we make it? Is the market what should be determining our morality as human beings, or is it something else? Miller’s genius is to couch these questions in a family drama that turns quite brutal at the end.
Miller wrote a famous essay entitled “Tragedy and the Common Man.” Can you comment about All My Sons in that light?
This piece is a tragedy rather than a melodrama (although there’s nothing wrong with melodrama—it’s a great form, and it doesn’t mean it’s less profound). I believe that Miller is creating a modern American tragedy here. There must be a tragic hero—and that’s Keller himself, who of course is completely flawed but who moves through the play to a moment of self-realization when he says: “Sure, he was my son. But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were.” In that moment, he accepts responsibility for what he has done and offers to go to prison, but knows that the correct response is to mete punishment on himself. Oh, you could say, he’s taking the easy way out, but no—Miller intends to show he’s taken ultimate responsibility. He says: “Nothing is bigger [than family]...and if there’s something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet in my head!” And in fact, he means it, so you arrive at a tragic realization and acceptance just like King Lear, who sees at the end that he’s done something profoundly wrong and asks for forgiveness.
You’ve worked on many of the classics. Do you enjoy it?
Yes, incredibly. My fiancée Cassie is a concert pianist. At the moment, she is working on Bach quite a lot, and I suppose it’s the same thing when I hear her practicing as working on the classics in the theatre. It gives you a bedrock. There is a vertical way of looking at it—my father was an archaeologist and used to have a vertical stratigraphic chart on the wall, where you can see the ages going down in time, through soil, then clay, then gravel, and so on down to the ice ages. It’s a completely different way of looking at time—vertically, rather than horizontally. The classics are like digging for the rock strata. That is what is wonderful about working on something like All My Sons. Halfway through our rehearsals, Dianne Wiest asked: “Where are we going”? and I said: “I don’t know.” And Dianne said: “Oh, it’s about taking away layers of skin, opening ourselves and becoming more raw.” That is what Rebecca Miller said about the first night—that what we have tried to do is to reveal the primitive power of the piece, and, she said, “It goes off like a grenade.”
So it’s attempting to find the explosive animal questions of humanity in the play, which of course are the questions at the heart of Greek drama. If you take a play like Oedipus Rex, the Greeks are posing the same questions, attempting to form a coherent code of human ethics. They’re trying to make sense of society, and a lot of what we do is based on their ideas. Miller is making reference to the Greeks himself. He’s asking the same questions of modern American society. The new economic order and mass-consumer capitalism—does it dehumanize, or humanize? Or does it have nothing to do with it? So Miller puts it under the microscope of the human family and asks us to watch.
How do you feel about the work, now that the play has opened?
It’s been a huge experience to do this on Broadway, because I’m able to gain an insight into what it’s like to create theatre at the highest level in America, to see the problems that actors, producers and everyone faces, to work through those problems and, because of what we’ve done, to say: You can do theatre like this, you can do a radical interpretation on Broadway. You’ll face a lot of difficulties along the way, but instead of importing a production from London, Americans producers and directors should get out there and begin an assault on Broadway and reclaim those theatres for what they really can do. That’s idealistic for me to say, I know, but I know it’s possible if you get the right cast and approach it with the right team, with people who are courageous enough to go there. It’s not easy, though. You have to be prepared for a considerable amount of aggression. All My Sons is a deeply political play, and to stage it in a radical way is in itself a risk, a political act, but people are rising to it, the audience is rising to it.
Ultimately, I am completely reliant on my actors. They have made this piece. I’ve steered the ship, but they have made it. They’ve seized on the concept we’ve developed together. I trust them to speak to their audience, rather than imposing my idea of what it should be. This is piece of work has been made in good faith—a serious drama with serious intentions on Broadway, with American actors and an American production. My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather are all Americans, and I have a great feeling, being here.
Carol Rocamora teaches in the department of dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
On Working with McBurney
Carol Rocamora asked some of the All My Sons cast and Rebecca Miller, the playwright’s daughter, to comment on
what was memorable about working with Simon McBurney.
Rebecca Miller: I was simply stunned by Simon’s production. To me, the raw power of the play has never been unleashed in this way. At least I have not seen it done. The actors begin at a high level of energy and commitment—as they must, because they are going to ascend to Titan heights by the end. From the first moment, the production is telling us, this is reality, and yet more than reality—it is reality played out in a mythic arena, yet never losing its personal connection to each member of the audience. Beside me, a grown man was sobbing in the third act; he simply couldn’t control his emotional reaction to the play. I have never had so many cathartic, spine-tingling moments in a theatre production. And best of all, Simon’s interpretation has humility, for all its genius. All the imagery, all the sound design, has its roots in the text. It is the purest manifestation of the play I can imagine. I hope this will open the door to more extraordinary, unexpected productions of Miller plays.
John Lithgow: For me, the closest thing to working with Simon was my drama school days in the late ’60s, the days of the Living Theatre and Peter Brook’s boldest experiments. We were pushing the boundaries of proscenium theatre back then. All My Sons was a “stripping away” process, robbing us all of the old habits we had come to rely on. It was challenging, exhausting, maddening, and ultimately thrilling. And to think, we were doing all this for a big revival of a warhorse play on Broadway! I kept thinking to myself, “Things are looking up.”
Patrick Wilson: Simon managed to balance an incredibly visionary directing style with graciousness and camaraderie. He’s always willing to change things if they don’t serve the play. It all starts with the words for Simon. He pushed us to the absolute limit, because the text demands it, not because he is trying a “style” on the actors. He is unbelievably patient. You rarely see a director with such focus and drive, but he will take as long as it takes to make his actors comfortable. I knew from the moment we sat down and talked that this experience would change me as an actor, and it continues to, every day.
Christian Camargo: From the first meeting everything was different. I never read for him. We simply talked about theatre then dove into four days of workshops. Can’t all auditions be like that? He built a family out of us by learning his language together from scratch. To learn a part of the Complicite process was a dream come true. To put it simply, Simon’s process empowered us actors to own his vision. Dynamics is a big part of that process—the variations of rhythms and patterns that exist in nature and ourselves, and how we work under heightened circumstances. I’ve learned so much from him. He knows how to inspire, whether it’s through music, image or the all-important text. Simon creates an exciting atmosphere to play in. He thrives on it, as we all do.