Theatre Quotes - Page 9

In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice

It's communication - that's what theatre is all about.

When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting.

For the theatre one needs long arms... an artiste with short arms can never make a fine gesture.

Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they'll leave the theatre happy.

When actors go onstage, you know immediately if they can do their job. You can be a lawyer or an accountant for years and not find out.

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.

You weren't going to the theatre to change the world, but you had a chance to affect the world, the thinking and the feelings of the world.

The musical has always been in jeopardy - until - or was in jeopardy until it was realised that it is probably the safest living theatre art form.

Acting is a trick word invented in the festival of Dionysus, before Christ, in Greece at a fertility festival. That's where theatre came from: a fertility festival. No women were allowed. All the men played all the parts.

Getting the call to be in The Goblet of Fire was like being welcomed into the most exclusive upper circle of some elite actors' club. You sit on set with the cream of the National Theatre and the RSC, all clutching wands or wearing witches' hats.

They have a desire to put on plays and to fulfill that traditional role of a theater in a community: to be the place where people go to hear the truth.

Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.

Mum did a lot of commercial theatre and farces in the 1980s and '90s to make sure the school bills were paid.

Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

We have freedom of speech, but you got to watch what you say.

I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.

I suppose as an actor you become very sensitive to rhythm, not just rhythm as you look at it sort of from the, from the outside as a director might see it, but within yourself you become used to the idea of hearing your fellow actors, responding to them in space.

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.

Theatre, in which actors take on changing roles, has among its many functions the examination of identity. For the individual, theatre is a kind of identity laboratory in which social roles can be examined vicariously.

In theatre, presence is the matrix of power; the postmodern theatre of resistance must therefore both expose the collusion of presence with authority and resist such collusion by refusing to establish itself as the charismatic Other.

Never meddle with play-actors, for they're a favoured race.