Complicité

Complicité is a British theatre company founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, Marcello Magni and Fiona Gordon.

They describe the main principles of their work as "seeing what is most alive, integrating text, music, image and action to create surprising, disruptive theatre".

Major productions include The Master and Margarita (2011/12), A Dog's Heart (2010) with De Nederlandse Opera and English National Opera, Endgame (2009), Shun-kin (2008), A Disappearing Number (2007), Measure for Measure (2004), The Elephant Vanishes (2003, 2004) (performed in Japanese, adapted from the work of the writer Haruki Murakami), The Noise of Time (2000) (about the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich, title from the 1925 memoir and collected essays by the poet Osip Mandelstam, published in English in 1993); Mnemonic (1999); and The Street of Crocodiles (1992) (inspired by the life and works of Bruno Schulz).

It was created by four young people whose aim was to bring the physical disciplines they had learned at the Jacques Lecoq Mime School in Paris to the largely text-based British theatre.

The first production, Put It On Your Head, was a darkly hilarious examination of an English seaside resort and attracted modest attention.

But the breakthrough came in 1988 when it presented a 15-weeks season of its work at London's Almeida Theatre including its first ever production of an existing text: a version of Durrenmatt's The visit which contained a prize winning performance by Kathryn Hunter as the vengeful plutocrat and which used mime to recreate the atmosphere of a small, run-down European town.

Since then Complicite has become one of the most sought-after companies on the international touring circuit and has been adapted literally from texts to the stage including Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles, John Berger' s The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol and J.M.

Above all, it shows an astonishing ability to re-create whole communities such as that of a small Polish town in Street of Crocodiles and a peasant village in the Hautes-Alpes in Lucie Cabrol.

[8]Other than revenue from ticket sales, Complicité receives funding from two sources: Arts Council England and private donations.