In theatre, you've got to make the connect with your audience in the first three minutes. If you haven't, you know you've almost lost them.
When I first did theatre, I was always doing comedies; it was always my first love. But it wasn't what I was picked for at first, for films and TV.
Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.
The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit, fumed-oak drill hall serving as a temporary soap box for political propaganda.
Where we're telling the story of the history of the ensemblist [in the "Ensemblist Essentials"], using the nine musicals that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as fixed points in time We're going from 1931 to 2016 and using these shows to talk about what the typical show was like for an ensemblist at the time; did this show change anything about that job, while it was changing everything about the way theatre was written and produced and made?
I have such a passion for theatre.
Let a single complete action, in one place and one day, keep the theatre packed to the last.
They're not so much fans of independent movies are they are of independent theatres. They like small theaters with a vague, septic smell. They're not wild about the newfangled theaters with the assigned seating.
I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.
I'm trying to do the kind of projects that I want to see in the theatre.
I don't know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you're losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot.
I still audition a lot - it depends on the medium. For film, I audition just like everyone else, because it's a different set of casting directors. For television and theatre - well, for theater, there's some auditioning that has to happen, just for them to know that you can sing it, and how you'd take on the part. But for TV, things are getting a little better with, "Would you like to be a part of this?" But that's really for one - night things. It sounds like a pompous answer, if I say people are calling me to ask me to do things.
As far as I'm concerned, the world is composed of stories. For architects, the world is composed of buildings, for actors the world is composed of theatres, or whatever... For me, the world is simply composed of stories, when I look, that's what I see.
My family is not at all involved in television, or film, or theatre, or any of it, really.
I'm doing The Physicists, which is great, and I do have my agent to thank for that because a lot of agents try and talk you out of doing theatre. They don't push theatre because you can make more money doing television, whereas theatre wages are pretty shocking. But it's something I've always been keen to do and have been encouraged to do so, which is nice.
I think film likes me better than the theatre does for some reason.
Films take up so much time, and with theatre, you do have to plan a period of time that you can be free.
Is there anything more terrible than a "call"? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.
When I was ten, I saw 'Grease' on stage and thought: 'I want to be part of that; it looks like so much fun.' My mum enrolled me in a local theatre group, and it all went from there.
Most of my work is okay to look at on a TV screen or a flat screen, but this is actually much better in a theatre.
I am a theatre actor, but the last ten years I've taken parts in movies because it keeps me in money.
I had been nine years in the theatre and hadn't had massive success. My only thing was I wanted to be an actor and I didn't care when, where, or how much for.
The old guys like me started in the theatre. I was in the theatre for nine years.
To imagine myself in different ways comes from my beginnings in the theatre. People are more accepting when you go 'apparently', 'wildly' afield from who you are or where you were brought up.
Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong.
