Like most children, the young Simon McBurney was fascinated by the things he wasn't supposed to do. "Anything that was illegal became immediately interesting to me. I spent the majority of time at school trying to break the rules. I would climb to the top of buildings; I even burned a building down once – not intentionally, just because I was interested in fire. I remember going through the rule book, ticking off the ones I had broken and looking for the ones I hadn't."
He might be stretching the truth – "Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling," he believes – but his youthful rebellion is suggestive of the way this director, actor and writer has set about breaking theatre's rules.
Ever since he started making work with Complicite, the company he co-founded in 1983, McBurney's guiding principle has been to create whatever he feels he is not seeing on Britain's stages. His productions draw on international theatre, dance, music, literature and developing technologies, not to mention his training in movement at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris, to fulfil one simple rule: that "the text of the different parts of theatre must be as articulate as the spoken word". Though he has been hailed as an innovator, McBurney is suspicious of such evaluations. "There's nothing really original," he says. "There's only the question of whether something is alive, and speaking to you."
This is precisely what he is good at: making things – inanimate objects, abstruse concepts, even a 5,000-year-old corpse – come thrillingly alive. In Complicite's 1992 show A Street of Crocodiles, books fluttered across the stage as a flock of birds; in 1999's Mnemonic, which won an Olivier award for best new play, the story of a man stumbling towards death was represented by a wooden chair. In A Disappearing Number, another Olivier award-winner, which is being revived in London's West End this month, complex mathematical equations become vivid metaphors for personal relationships.
McBurney is sometimes criticised for putting style over substance, most recently in reviews of his Japanese production Shun-kin, which is also being revived this autumn, at London's Barbican. But even the play's vehement detractors concede their astonishment at the magical transformation of a puppet into a flesh-and-blood actor, and have been seduced by the show's crepuscular lighting.
The one thing McBurney doesn't do is present straightforward linear stories. Whether creating a show from scratch or adapting a work of literature – by John Berger, say, or Haruki Murakami – he will overlap narratives, past and present, fact and fiction, so that they communicate with each other. "Very rarely do I find a linear story to be a reflection of life as I see it," he says. "The story of Oedipus, say, is useful to us because we have all had the experience of wanting to kill our father, and we can act out the horror of those thoughts in another context. So the linear story can give you a reduction of life. But if I'm representing life, I want to make connections between things."
Even talking about himself, McBurney delivers almost nothing straight. He doesn't so much answer questions as meander around them. His description of a recent "extraordinary experience", taking A Disappearing Number to India (the show revolves around an Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan), takes approximately 40 minutes and incorporates, among other digressions: a potted history of Indian theatre; a eulogy of director Habib Tanvir and his Naya theatre company, whose Charan the Thief, seen in London in 1982, in which "the way someone expressed joy was to do a double backwards somersault", was a strong influence; the need for baroque excess in Bollywood films; the rootlessness of many modern actors; and, for good measure, the immorality of the free-market economy. Listening to him, you feel as though you are being tugged through the twisting back streets of a foreign city by a skittish guide, with no idea of what you might see or where you might end up.
His circumlocutions make him difficult to pin down. But then, he is deliberately resistant to any such attempt, drawing on Rita Carter's book Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality to explain his evasiveness. "What she articulates is that we are all multiple people, but we have an illusion that we are one single self, and an illusion of continuity in the present . . . it corresponds to my sense of who I am."
His approach to theatre-making was forged in the 1980s, and so was his political activism – his resistance to "the blind, almost fundamentalist adherence to a consumer capitalist society". He travelled widely in his late teens and early 20s, to Canada and the US, to Greece, the USSR, in part to escape Thatcher's Britain, where he felt "constantly in political opposition. Living in France while the Falklands war was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don't talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many different ways."
He tends to choose the subtler options. For instance, he rarely visits countries as a tourist – "tourism is very destructive" – but travels in a focused attempt to learn about other cultures, with a view to making pieces of theatre that speak directly to those cultures. It means a great deal to him that in the ambiguous, shadowy, ironic Shun-kin Japanese audiences recognised themselves and their distinctive worldview.
The capitalist expansion of India, which he has been witnessing first-hand over the past decade while working on A Disappearing Number, raises for him an "urgent question, of who we are as people. We now have access to an extraordinary amount of knowledge, but that knowledge isn't necessarily part of us. I feel that knowledge brings responsibility – but how capable are human beings of a sense of responsibility?" It is a question he endeavours to answer in his theatre, in the same way that his favourite composers – Shostakovich, Schnittke, Edison Denisov – were "incredibly articulate about the nature of moral responsibility in the 20th century. You can hear the darkness and the fear in the music."
McBurney himself is driven by the desire for knowledge. At 53, he says: "I've hardly begun – I'm so curious about this and I need to know about that. I'm naturally attracted to something I don't understand, because when you try to deal with something you don't understand, it opens a door into another world."
A Disappearing Number grew from his increasing interest in mathematics, one of many subjects that had repelled him at school. "Mathematics is an art form that builds on itself. As a mathematician, you are adding to the sum of everything that is already known. You're not saying, 'I'm coming in here with my own individual voice', you're coming in with a collective voice. So you have a tremendous sense of human continuity as well as of mathematical continuity."
Collectivity and an awareness of continuity play a key role in McBurney's theatre. His sensitivity to the latter was instilled in him at birth: his father was an archaeologist who taught at Cambridge. It was his mother who imbued him with a passion for theatre: she had wanted to be an actor and encouraged McBurney and his two siblings to perform plays in their rambling Victorian house. But his parents also, unwittingly, gave him a sense of separation from other people that is partly to do with identity. "I don't know where I belong, to be honest. My father was American, my mother's Irish, I suppose I'm English but I've never felt particularly at home in England." He wonders whether it was the resultant longing for a sense of community that led him to acting, which he began at school.
Although he was a shy child, what McBurney loved about his schooldays was "making connections between people". He still enjoys this, working hard on the introductions to his plays to make explicit the audience's relationship to the actors. Mnemonic opened with each person in the audience holding an ivy leaf, imagining that its veins represented the lines of their ancestry and that everyone in the room was distantly related. At the beginning of A Disappearing Number, one of the actors instructs the audience to think of a number, double it, add 14, halve the result, then subtract their original number. "What I like about the theatre," he says, "is that we are all able to imagine the same thing at the same time, just as now, we are all imagining the number seven." It is a cheeky trick, but an effective one – it reminds the audience that their imaginative contribution to the show is crucial.
Collaboration, with audience, actors, designers, technicians, is central to McBurney's work, and has been since Complicite sprang into being in 1983. He makes the founding quartet – himself, director Annabel Arden, and actors Marcello Magni and Fiona Gordon – sound like outlaws: "Everybody was on the run." He knew Arden from Cambridge (to his parents' relief, the teenage McBurney buckled down long enough to pass the entrance exam), where they performed in Footlights alongside Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry. He met Magni (Italian) and Gordon (Canadian, born in Australia) at the beginning of the 1980s, at the Jacques Lecoq school.
The group was quickly successful, winning the Perrier comedy award at the Edinburgh festival in 1985 for their satire of Thatcherite capitalism, More Bigger Snacks Now. But they also quarrelled constantly. In 1989, just at the point, McBurney says, when they were "totally pissed off with each other and the whole thing was about to explode", they were offered a residency at the Almeida theatre in London for 15 weeks. It proved to be "a moment of metamorphosis": during that time they created 13 shows, one of which was the company's first stab at a classic text, a darkly comic interpretation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit, which transferred two years later to the National Theatre.
Afterwards, the quartet disbanded, but not until McBurney had been persuaded to take responsibility for Complicite as its artistic director. In the two decades since, the company has grown into "a constantly shifting community, like a tribe of people who go away and come back and go away and come back again". One of the things that binds them together is food: McBurney is passionate about cooking, and "we have large communal meals together".
Magni still works frequently with McBurney: he was an associate director on Endgame in London last year, and is performing in A Dog's Heart, McBurney's first opera, which opens at the English National Opera in November.
Every Complicite show is born out of chaos. The Elephant Vanishes – adapted from Murakami's exploration of ultra-modern technology and human disconnection – grew from an attempt at another Japanese show that failed ("I make a lot of things that nobody ever sees"). With opening night looming, rehearsals ground to a halt, and McBurney had to instruct his entire team to take 24 hours off to clear their heads. A Disappearing Number was incomplete when it first went on stage at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth in March 2007; it is only now, as he prepares to remount the show at the Novello theatre, that McBurney feels its problems are starting to be resolved.
He describes working on A Dog's Heart, which had its premiere at the Holland festival in Amsterdam in June, as "another wonderful collaborative process", but confesses that it, too, came perilously close to disaster when he and his designer, Michael Levine, decided to scrap their original set design after seeing it mocked up on stage, sending their producers into a panic. Equally unusual for the opera world, but more positive, was his approach to the score: treating it as he would a written text, he invited the composer, Alexander Raskatov, and a group of performers into a workshop so that they could play around with the music and understand it more fully.
With three productions opening in London over the next 10 weeks, McBurney is frantically busy. But then, he always has been. He is a writer, for the stage, obviously, but also of non-fiction for journals such as the Drawbridge and Brick. He is unexpectedly diffident discussing his writing, a hangover from school, where "I was such a ducker and diver that I never really believed in my own writing, so I always shied away from calling it that". Working on an opera was "a total liberation: you feel so confident that almost every move, every piece of emotion is there in the musical text. It's a sort of blessed relief after writing your own things, where you're constantly doubting what you've written."
Plus he is an actor for film and TV: he was a slippery British diplomat in The Last King of Scotland, and recently appeared as the parchment-dry Archdeacon Robert in the BBC comedy Rev. "Acting on film can be a wonderful release," he says, "because you've got to be very exact within a few words, and bring them to life in a very specific way." He is still smarting from the fact that he had to turn down an acting job, "a particularly unpleasant character" in a new film by Joe Wright, because it clashed with A Dog's Heart.
In A Disappearing Number, one of the characters interprets the mathematician GH Hardy's assertion that "the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value" as proof of the necessity of having children. It was while the show was playing at the Barbican in the autumn of 2007 that McBurney met his partner, Cassie Yukawa, on the street: "Just by chance, completely extraordinary chance. We literally just saw each other. I didn't believe that such things were true." The couple now live together in McBurney's flat in a former piano factory – another coincidence, as Yukawa is a pianist who has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York – and have two children, a girl and a boy. For McBurney, this is his life's "most surprising story" of all.
A Disappearing Number is at the Novello theatre until 25 September.
Box office: www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk / 0844 482 5170
Shun-kin is at the Barbican from 4-13 November.
Box office: 0845 120 7550 / www.barbican.org.uk/bite
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