Theatre Quotes - Page 11

I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.

Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.

A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.

We do not go to the theatre like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it.

I don't have a preference between theatre and film; I like to do both. But I will say that there's something about theatre that is more nourishing and sustaining than film ever can be.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

I think theatres will always remain a sacred place where people go for something live and experience things live, which is very different than the experience of film.

Theatres are built because they were the boards for entertainment.

I tell my children to avoid theatre and go into cinema and TV.

Playwriting isn't a calling so much as it is a hazing process.

Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.

Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be.

Theatre audiences can't be made to think and cry: at best, they can be made to think and laugh, or to feel and cry.

No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Every theatre worth anything has somebody in the middle of it who is driving it; like Joan Littlewood with her theatre.

We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.

But the stuff that I do is more like all the comic roles like in The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus and I just did this Offenbach operetta at the LA Opera. I love it. I just love it. For me, it's like a great mesh of musical theatre and my classical oboe background to be standing on these huge stages with a full orchestra and all the opulence. I'm a complete sucker for the over-the-topness.

The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life.

Chess and theatre often lead to madness.

The entrance into Jerusalem has all the elements of the theatre of the absurd: the poor king; truth comes riding on a donkey; symbolic actions - even parading without a permit!

From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex.

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.