About this Artist

Simon McBurney is an actor, writer, director, and co-founder of Complicité, where he has created more than 30 productions. His work, from site-specific installations to the reinvention of classic texts on Broadway, continuously resists definition, but has always been intimately bound up with music. With his brother Gerard McBurney he created Out of a House Walked a Man… (Complicité/RNT), The Noise of Time with the Emerson String Quartet (Complicité/ Lincoln Center), and Strange Poetry (Complicité/Los Angeles Philharmonic). He has collaborated with Peter Maxwell Davies, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Simon Rattle, Tom Waits, Nitin Sawhney, Pet Shop Boys, and Honjoh Hidetaro, one of Japan’s most respected classical shamisen players.

Recent work with Complicité includes Beware of Pity (with Schaubühne, Berlin),The Master and Margarita, Shun-kin, A Disappearing Number, Measure for Measure, The Elephant Vanishes, Pet Shop Boys Meet Eisenstein, and The Encounter, in which Simon McBurney performs. Other directing includes All My Sons (Broadway) and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (with Al Pacino in New York). He was the first British Artiste Associé at Festival d’Avignon in 2012, with The Master and Margarita opening the Festival. In 2009, he was awarded the Yomiuri Theater Award Grand Prize for Best Director for Shun-kin (the first non-Japanese artist to receive the award), and he was the recipient of the 2008 Berlin Academy of Arts Konrad Wolf Prize for Europe’s Outstanding Multidisciplinary Artists.