David Williams, 2005

In the late 1970s, Simon McBurney studied English at Cambridge University, where he was a performer and writer in the Cambridge Footlights alongside Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie and Annabel Arden. After graduating, he trained at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris before returning to London in 1983 to co-found Theatre de Complicite with Annabel Arden, Marcello Magni and Fiona Gordon. Having created almost thirty productions in the past twenty years, many of which have toured extensively, Complicite has established itself as one of Europe's most popular, critically lauded and influential theatre companies... More

Dominic Cavendish, 2003

'Twenty years ago this month, a group of young actors, fresh from studying theatre in Paris and burning to create a new kind of work using the skills they had acquired, formed their own company. They decided on the name Théâtre de la Complicité, partly in homage to their teachers, the mime gurus Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier, who encouraged an overt display of "complicity" between performers, and partly because they imagined they'd be working in France...' More

Simon McBurney, 2002

I had a teacher who said to me 'If an actor has forgotten what it is like to play as a child they should not be an actor'. What the child sees is transformed by imagination. The pattern in a carpet can become a world; a staircase a mountain; and everywhere there are secrets. I grew up without a television. I am sure its absence bent and angled the way I see. What did we do? Read books, sang, and went to bed early. From when we were very small my mother would make theatre with us. So the idea of 'making' your own theatre is something that I grew up with ...' More

Lyn Gardner, 2002

'I have always thought of Complicite as my theatre company. But then so have hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of other people too. After all, even the name suggests that the performers and the audience are somehow in cahoots, that we have reached an understanding and that we are all in this muddy, glittering thing called life together.

Since 1983 when Simon McBurney joined forces with Cambridge contemporary Annabel Arden and Jacques Lecoq graduates Marcello Magni and Fiona Gordon to produce a one off-show about the English seaside called Put It On Your Head, Complicite has been helping us make sense of the world, making us laugh and weep and making us see the things that we would otherwise have missed. More than any other company they see the extraordinary in the ordinary and ignored. I love them for it, because they give me a stake not just in the theatre, but in my own little life ...' More