Simon is in mid-speech with his arms held out in front of him as he makes a point.

Simon McBurney

Co-founder & Artistic Director

Actor, writer and director Simon McBurney is one of the most innovative, mercurial and influential theatre-makers working today. In 1983, he co-founded the company Complicité and since then all his work has been made through a deeply researched and highly collaborative process which fuses a profound belief that all aspects of the theatre should challenge the limits of theatrical form.

In 2024 Mnemonic returned at London’s National Theatre to critical acclaim. Conceived and directed by Simon, its exploration of origins, memory, migration and time remains as strikingly relevant as when it first debuted 25 years ago.

As well as writing and creating original works, Simon has brought great plays and adaptations to the stage, including: The Master and Margarita (2012), Beware of Pity (2015) and most recently, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2022). He also adapted Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising into a 12-part dramatisation for radio alongside author Robert MacFarlane for BBC World Service in 2022.

Simon’s opera work includes: A Dog’s Heart (2010), The Magic Flute (2012), The Rake’s Progress (2017) and Wozzeck (2020).

Simon is currently partway through a collaboration with choreographer Crystal Pite for Nederlands Dans Theater. This is the first time Simon has created a work for a dance company exclusively. The works that have premiered at Amare, The Hague and toured so far are: Figures in Extinction [1.0] (2022) and Figures in Extinction [2.0] But then you come to the humans (2024), with the third set to premiere in the UK in 2025. Figures in Extinction [1.0] was awarded a Zwaan Award for the most impressive dance production at the 2022 Nederlandse Dansdagen.

Simon’s work continually returns to political, social and philosophical questions of the way we live, think and act as a society and he is unafraid of melding the most ancient of theatrical forms with the most recent aspects of modern technology. These aspects of Simon’s work are all present in the award-winning The Encounter (2015), described as ‘one of the most fully-immersive theatre pieces ever created’ by the New York Times. In 2021, he co-directed Fehinti Balogun’s Can I Live?; a vital digital performance about the climate catastrophe which follows Fehinti’s personal journey into the biggest challenge of our times.

His numerous awards include the Berlin Konrad Woolf Prize for Europe’s Outstanding Multi-Disciplinary Artists (2008) and the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in Japan (2009). He was Artiste Associé at the 2012 Avignon Festival and has honorary doctorates at several universities including Lund in Sweden, London Metropolitan University and Cambridge University.

In 2016 his wife, Cassie introduced him to Polly Higgins and the Stop Ecocide campaign which seeks to have Ecocide (unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge there will be widespread or long-term damage to the environment) enshrined in international law. He asks that anyone reading this joins him in supporting this campaign by going to Stop Ecocide.

Worked on