Theatre Quotes
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.
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.
I wanted to be a musical theatre actress - I wanted to play Sally Bowles, forever and ever always.
The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.
Lighting is not about function. It's much more about the mood and the emotion that the playwright and the director are trying to create. Our job is to support their poetic direction.
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.
The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.
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 assembled inside this ancient / and insane theatre / To propagate our lust for life / and flee the swarming wisdom / of the streets
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
We haven't truly had a zeitgeisty, 'songs on the radio' show, since...I want to say "One Night in Bangkok" was the last musical theatre song that charted. That was so long ago.
Normally when people ask me what I do I say I'm an actor, and that's what I always wanted to be and that's the way I approach work even when I'm directing it.
Then I left school at 16 and worked in Perth Repertory Theatre, which was quite nearby where I lived. And I worked there for about six or seven months, as part of the stage crew.
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.
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.
Theatre should be a taxing experience: the greatest achievement of a writer is to produce a character who creates anxiety.
Auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theatre and burlesque... a lot of people are going to be making a lot of excuses or maintaining that they were never part of this.
Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.
The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience. That audience looks collectively at what is going on on the stage and collectively imagines that this is real.
But men must know, that in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.
Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.
By obtaining a sense of its place in the unfolding drama of life, set in an ecological theatre, so we can understand why it has become one of the leading players.
I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.
Choosing to be in the theatre was a way to put my roots down somewhere with other people. It was a way to choose a new family.
One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty quick.
January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead.
I'd been gearing up to working in theatre since coming out of drama school, but it was an exciting time for TV drama - it was the birth of Channel 4, and Brookside was very cutting-edge at the time.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every theatre worth anything has somebody in the middle of it who is driving it; like Joan Littlewood with her theatre.
History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.
I call the art of theatre a "dirty art", since there are so many people involved who have needs and whims to be satisfied.
