Questions for John

John Berger and Simon McBurney conversed, collaborated, freely supported and intimately shared their collective processes for 25 years, from 1992 to 2017.

Around the kitchen table in John’s house in the Haute-Savoie, in Simon’s flat on the Holloway Road, and in rehearsal rooms across Europe, their conversations circled the same questions that now press in on us with renewed force: how to remain human in the face of violence, how to keep faith with the dead, how to look without turning away, and how to act when answers are no longer enough.

Questions for John holds the echoes of that relationship while asking the most urgent questions about how, or if, we can respond to the events of our time. Events that mean, inevitably, we have questions we long to be answered, but which are perhaps unanswerable.

Everyone who has felt the shelter and hospitality of Berger’s writing knows that his work does not offer refuge from the world, but a way of looking at it more truthfully. In a time when wars, ecological collapse and political cruelty arrive daily on the screens we hold in our hands, Berger’s insistence on attention feels newly necessary.

To attend is not passive. It is an act of resistance. It is how bonds are made, how grief is shared, how love refuses to disappear.

What has become of the bonds that unite us?
Why do we destroy what we love?
And what can art do today?

Simon and John collaborated on numerous projects including Mnemonic, A Disappearing Number and The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, a stage adaptation of Berger’s text Into Their Labours.

We’re launching our version of a monthly book club, focusing on a different Berger text each month. We’ll highlight the book we’re currently thinking about, and share how it has shaped the development of Questions for John. Beginning in July, this series is an exclusive offer for our membership programme which brings supporters closer to the company, our influences and the creation of our work. You can join as a Complicité member from £100 annually, which will also grant you early access to tickets for future UK tour dates and an exclusive annual event programme. Find out more here.

A Complicité co-production with Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, Edinburgh International Festival, Les Nuits de Fourvière, festival international de la métropole de Lyon, MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis and Les Célestins, Théâtre de Lyon, in association with the Barbican, London.

© Hannes Flaschberger