Time feels out of joint, in a very Shakespearean sense, when I first meet up with Simon McBurney near his Gloucestershire home in July. The morning’s schedule has been thrown by a live stream of Peter Brook’s funeral from Paris. Kathryn Hunter has just dropped out of the lead role in Complicité’s latest production for unspecified personal reasons, and he has one of his three young children in tow. There’s a fair amount of eye-rolling as the production team struggle to keep on top of the timetable for the upcoming show, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which is quite literally on the drawing board.
In September, when we talk again on Zoom, things have settled down. Hunter is back in the show at her own request, the “personal reasons” having played out in the shocking death of her husband, Marcello Magni. “It’s an incredibly painful moment,” says McBurney, who co-founded the company with Magni and Annabel Arden back in 1983. “I think the fact that the piece is about loss, and that we’ll make it together, is a wonderful thing because originally I wanted him to be involved, assuming that he would be well enough to come and work with us. We were aware that he was ill for a year, but we didn’t understand the speed of it.”
