In 2014, British actor and theatre-maker Simon McBurney went to the Amazon rainforest. Twenty years earlier, he had been given a copy of Petru Popescu's book Amazon Beaming: an extraordinary account of a National Geographic photojournalist, Loren McIntyre, who in 1971 was stranded in a remote part of the jungle with the Mayoruna people — an Indigenous tribe untouched by modern civilization — and had his 'doors of perception' blown wide open.
Among the many incredible experiences McIntyre recounted to Popescu was what he called "thought transference": non-verbal communication between himself and the tribe's headman. Over the course of his sojourn with the Mayoruna, McIntyre's understanding of himself and the world was turned upside down and inside out.
Decades later, McBurney wanted to turn this story into a theatre show that would similarly blow the minds of his audience. Why? He gives an eloquent, persuasive explanation in his 2015 preface to the reprint of Amazon Beaming:
"It is both salutary and necessary to have our assumptions challenged in the self-centred times we live in. To really consider the idea that we are deeply interconnected, inseparable from one another, just as we are inseparable from nature even when we do not think of ourselves as 'living in nature'. To truly accept that we are part of the ecosystem wherever we are and that we cannot escape it, just as we cannot escape the planet. And also to accept that our ability to hear, to listen to each other, is perhaps essential for our collective survival. These thoughts are urgent because, in order to survive, we need to acknowledge that there is another way of seeing the world and our place in it."
In 2015, McBurney premiered his stage adaptation, The Encounter: A tour de force combination of a solo live performance, on-stage foley art and in-ear sound design — delivered through individual headphones worn by audience members. It's a perfect marriage of form and content: Through the power of the story being told to us by the performer on stage (McBurney), and astoundingly 'immersive' binaural sound design, each audience member — sitting alone in their cone of sound, but together with many others in the theatre — undertakes the very act of collective imagination that the story is grappling with.
The Encounter went on to tour Europe, North America, Russia and Australia (where it showed in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide), garnering rave reviews and selling out seasons. In 2019, The Guardian ranked it #13 in the 50 best theatre works of the 21st century. In 2020, with the world in COVID lockdown, The Guardian screened a filmed version of the show.
Suffice to say: The Encounter put Simon McBurney on the global map in a way that no other show in his four-decade career has — and consolidated his reputation as theatre-maker of rare inventiveness and vision.
This month, McBurney returns to Australia with a very different offer: His interpretation of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. Filmed by New York's Metropolitan Opera, where it opened in May, it will beam into Australian cinemas from Saturday for a limited run.
The Magic Flute is a world away — quite literally — from McIntyre's mind-blowing adventure in the Amazon, and more than two centuries separate The Magic Flute's genesis in 1791, Vienna, from its contemporary audience.
McBurney closes the gap with his production, which resonates clearly in the present, and carries a message almost as urgent as The Encounter, if more subtly telegraphed: That art literally holds the answer to humankind's existential crises.
A master storyteller
Talking to McBurney, you quickly understand the power of a good story — and realise that he's a master at spinning one.
When I reach him, via Zoom, it's near midnight in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the small market town in the Cotswolds where he lives with his wife, concert pianist Cassie Yukawa, and their three children. He's 90 minutes late to the call because he's been on bedtime duties; but listening to him talk about the valley and community his family lives in, and the birdlife, and the garden where his children grow vegetables, any angst about deadlines fades.
McBurney paints Stroud as an intriguing, left-of-centre community that runs the gamut of "witches covens", hippies and climate activists (it's the birthplace of Extinction Rebellion and the location of Stop Ecocide's international headquarters, he tells me) — with only a "handful of Tories".
"It's slightly different to the rest of the Cotswolds, which are a little bit 'chocolate box' — and full of David Cameron clones, which is unspeakable," he says drily.
He tries to get back home as much as he can when working internationally, and says that pre-COVID, he had it written into his work contracts that he would return each weekend. Family is at the front of his mind.
McBurney, 65, became a father in 2009, and he tells me having kids has affected his activism around climate change and the work he does — as a solo operator, and with his world-renowned company Complicité, which he co-founded in 1983.
"Those are the things that wake me up every night and I go, 'Why the f**k am I doing this [work]? And what kind of world are my children inhabiting?' So, yes, it obsesses me. But I can only attack it through the means that I have at my disposal."
McBurney's current Complicité projects include the series Figures in Extinction, in collaboration with Nederlands Dans Theater; the digital theatre production Can I Live?, in which young British actor Fehinti Balogun shares his journey to climate activism; and an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk's 2019 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a droll murder mystery in which nasty men who abuse nature get their comeuppance.
Beyond his work, he's been a vocal, public proponent of both Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Stop Ecocide, attending and Tweeting about rallies. In an impassioned video promoting XR's April 2019 London rally, he said:
"Everything has to change, and that is our challenge, as Naomi Klein puts it: not simply to spend a lot of money [or] change a lot of policies … It's that we need to think differently, or radically differently, for those changes to be possible."
So what does all this have to do with Mozart's 'chocolate box' opera, about a prince who ventures into a magical kingdom to win the love of a princess, with the aid of a magic flute; an opera whose most popular iteration to date has been Julie Taymor's abridged, English language version for families, featuring colourful animal puppets?
And why is one of the world's most experimental theatre-makers shackling himself to an artform that is inherently constrained by its set score and libretto, but also by the limitations of performers whose main business is singing?
As with most questions posed to Burney, the answer is a cracking story. But it starts with a disclaimer: "I grew up not enjoying opera at all, and I had no real relationship to it."
"But then I was persuaded into it about 14 years ago, to do a new opera. And one of the reasons I did that was that I got to rewrite the libretto so that the dramatic shape of it really worked, and [so] I felt I could make it [the production] work. And it had a dog in it — so that was also a big draw for me. It was based on [Mikhail] Bulgakov's short story Heart of A Dog, which is a fantastic piece."
That opera, titled A Dog's Heart, was commissioned and produced by the Dutch National Opera (where it premiered in 2010) and English National Opera, in collaboration with Complicité, and looked more like avant-garde theatre than a typical, capital-o "Opera".
"It happened to be a huge success — and so on the back of that I was asked to do Mozart. First I was asked to do Don Giovanni, and I said I wouldn't do that. And then I was asked to do The Magic Flute, and I said I wouldn't do that. But then I was persuaded to do it. And the reason I wouldn't do it [initially] is that it's very difficult and the libretto is very complicated. It's a mess, basically. And it's full of oddities and misogyny and weirdness," he explains.
"But the music is sublime."
Mozart's love letter to music
Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) premiered in 1791, in Vienna, just two months before Mozart's death from illness at the age of 35. The second-last piece he wrote, it represents a composer at the peak of his powers — but it was essentially a "money job".
On the down and out after a couple of dry years, and impoverished, Mozart took up an offer by theatre impresario and performer Emanuel Schikaneder to write the music for an existing libretto — a fairytale "singspiel" (a popular form at the time, mixing spoken dialogue and singing) aimed not at the elite (as most of Mozart's work was) but the lower-class audiences who frequented Schikaneder's theatre.
The libretto, a rehash of an old story, is generally considered a bit of a mess, and involves an outsized, comedic role — a bird-catching buffoon called Papageno — that was written by Schikaneder for himself. The plot revolves around the adventures of a young prince who is asked by the Queen of the Night to rescue her daughter from her rival, the priest Sarastro, who presides over the Temple of Wisdom and rules the kingdom of the Sun. The prince succeeds both with the help of and despite Papageno, and with the aid of a magical flute.
McBurney, an opera neophyte, approached the project as a curious outsider: "I was interested in what people actually heard at the time. What was going on [in the world]? Why did he [Mozart] do it?"
He enlisted his brother: composer and academic Gerard McBurney (who had also had a huge hand in A Dog's Heart, having studied in the USSR and specialised in Russian music).
"He showed me what was going on musically, and I [also] started to piece together historically, what happened," says McBurney.
In 1791, Europe was at the tail end of its so-called Enlightenment, with massive leaps forward in science and technology (including the steam engine, the seed drill and the hot air balloon) transforming every aspect of life and ushering in the Industrial Revolution.
In France, meanwhile, a different kind of revolution was in its bloody infancy — with its tremors felt through Europe.
"And suddenly in Vienna, probably the greatest composer in the world at that point takes on a popular piece of theatre — the equivalent of what we call a pantomime," says McBurney.
The premiere took place against a backdrop of deep unrest in Vienna.
"There's also deep oppression — people are not really allowed to talk about the political situation. There's terror at the idea that there is going to be blood running in the streets of Vienna, because you have a tyrannical monarchy and the middle class desperately want to get rid of it; for people to be able to get on with their lives and to start living a modern existence," McBurney explains.
The theatre-maker threw the weight of his imagination behind Mozart: "Let's imagine that Mozart is relatively smart, and that he's aware [of the political context]: He's been in Paris, he knows what Europe is like; he knows what the world is like. And he knows that if society is to change, people's consciousness has to change," he speculates.
"And here, I'm slowing down [and] my tone is becoming a little bit pompous, as I start to say these things," he says, pausing for effect and smiling mischievously. "But what I mean to say is: As well as something light and pantomimic and funny, there is, I think, something serious underneath [The Magic Flute]; there is a dramatic point.
"The story is about a young man who falls in love with a girl just through a picture, and then fights to liberate her from what he thinks is a tyrant — and then discovers that this is not a tyrant — and goes through a series of trials which test his inner resolve.
"And this woman herself is, as portrayed by Mozart in particular, extraordinary in the arias that she sings, and very strong. She insists on going through the tests with him … She takes the power, if you like. And then the conjunction of the two [lovers] sets off the possibility of a new world, which is what Sarastro is looking for. It's been a world torn apart by the Queen — and the Queen, in a sense, is a little bit like the monarchy in Austria. And Sarastro is perhaps the spiritual centre. But the point is: It's a world on the cusp of disaster, in which something must change in the way that people think.
"My fantasy is that Mozart understood the necessity for a new consciousness in the middle of the Enlightenment — and his belief was that you could change consciousness through music.
"The flute is magic: It makes people behave in a different way. And [Papageno's] bells are magic. They reveal a new world and they make people do different things. For Mozart, there's no question that he believed that music had a transformative effect on people. He had seen it, he had experienced it [himself], [and] he had manipulated people with it. He knew what it could do."
A collective act of imagination
This fantasy is the foundation stone of McBurney's vision — and his reason for hewing close to the context of the original production in creating his (extremely contemporary) version.
The key elements of his staging concept directly honour Schikaneder's populist theatre, the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden: The orchestra pit is raised so it's level with the stage and the stalls (these days the orchestra is below stage during an opera), and the visuals and special effects are created much as they would have been in the day — including a foley artist who we see on stage, and an artist whose live-drawn images and visual effects are projected onto the stage.
The live creation of theatrical effects is a trademark of Complicité's physical, visual brand of theatre, which is informed by its co-founders' training under influential French 'clowning' maestro Jacques Lecoq, in the early 80s. Other Complicité signatures make their way into McBurney's Magic Flute, such as performers fluttering paper programs to evoke a flock of birds.
Cumulatively, it's as if the audience is peeking behind the veil of mystery shrouding the spectacle — which is, of course, precisely the point.
"One of the interesting things of making theatre still, for me, is that when you're in a space collectively, at a certain moment, you all imagine the same thing at the same time. It gives the lie to the idea of the individual consciousness and the solo imagination," says McBurney.
He cites a scientific survey of theatre audiences: "When they hooked all these people up, they found that everybody's hearts begin to beat in unison [when they're watching the same show]."
"We are collective beings," he says, emphatically. "And I think, you know, if there's any hope for us, then we need to act collectively."
The Magic Flute is showing in limited cinemas from August 19.