Quotes about theatre

All life is theatre,' he said. 'We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves....

The Director's Role: You are the obstetrician. You are not the parent of this child we call the play. You are present at its birth for clinical reasons, like a doctor or midwife. Your job most of the time is simply to do no harm.When something does go wrong, however, your awareness that something is awry--and your clinical intervention to correct it--can determine whether the child will thrive or suffer, live or die.

Life is like theatre. Each new day is a new scene with new acts and roles to portray. The sets always change. You come across new dialogue and lines to exchange between others. Scripts are improvised. But the beauty in it is that everyday, you are constantly learning who you are and how others around you are. Express yourself and empathize. It's okay to wear a mask every now and then but remember that you'll eventually meet fellow thespians who will find a way to break down your walls and barrie

God is fucking stealing souls again!

You have to understand your best. Your best isn't Barrymore's best or Olivier's best or my best, but your own. Every person has his norm. And in that norm every person is a star. Olivier could stand on his head and still not be you. Only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can reach what you can if you do it. So do it. We need your best, your voice, your body. We don't need for you to imitate anybody, because that would be second best. And second best is no better than your worst.

When you step from the wings onto the stage you go from total blackness to a blinding hot glare. After a moment you adjust, but there is that moment. like being inside lightning.

I have Shakespeared my Moliere to Tenessee, and I am Wild for Becket! But I got a little tired of the redundancy.

This was our last night. We only had one curtain call, Bree. And I thought they were going to give us a standing ovation, but no-o-o-. Do you know why half the audience stood up?""To get a head start on the traffic," Bree said."To get a head start on the traffic," Antonia agreed in indignation. "I mean, here we are, dancing and singing our little guts out, and all those folks want to do is get to bed early. I ask you, whatever happened to common courtesy? Whatever happened to decent manners? Doe

That's something we all want to know, isn't it? Is there a "purpose" to our form and substance? Or are we simply the random result of billions of years of chemical reactions and accidents influenced by pressures from the environment?..."-Jules, BOOM

What are all the thoughts rattling in your mind when you're not listening to the answers to questions you ask?" -Jo, Boom

What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?Beatrice: Is it possible disdain should die while she hathsuch meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?

If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.

The beauty of theatre was that it was a moving, changing art form—only those who watch the same performance night in after night out see the real naturalistic drama at work—the small changes, adjustments, changes in articulation or intonation, the addition of a cough or hiccup, a longer pause rife with more (or less) meaning, the character’s movement across the stage a step slower, a step closer to the audience, the change of a word here and there, an overall change in mood and tone, the actors

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

I would like to curl up and become a small thing. About this big. And still. Very still. Have you ever become so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved’s hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?

The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.

No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.

You'll never really be great unless you aim high.

I've never been in love, never in my life.Oh, I've dreamed of love, dreamed endlessly, day and night,but my soul is like a fine piano that's locked,and the key is lost.

I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing.

I think a person has to believe in something,or search out some kind of faith;otherwise life is empty, nothing.How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,why children are born, why there are stars in the sky...Either you know why you live,or it's all small, unnecessary bits.

Oh, where is it, where did my past go, when I was young, happy and intelligent, when my dreams and thoughts had some grace, and the present and future were lit up with hope? Why is it, that when we've just started to live, we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, useless, with flattened-out souls?

What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop...

When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves.

When you snatch happiness in little bits, fits and starts, and lose it, like me, you become coarse, little by little, you become hateful.

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.His name, as I ought to have told you before,Is really Asparagus. That's such a fussTo pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake,And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake.Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats —But no longer a terror to mice or to rats.For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime;Though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time.And whenever he joins his friends at thei

If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience.

If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.

A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.

We number nothing that we spend for you;Our duty is so rich, so infinite,That we may do it still without accompt.Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,That we, like savages, may worship it.

Backstage was chaos distilled into a very small space.

Artists are social sensors and transmitters of ideas

Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.

I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.

I sometimes wish they would swagger more now buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and keep them rogues and vagabonds which is what at heart - bless 'em - they are.

Actor-manager - one to whom the part is greater than the whole.

I know it was wonderful but I don't know how I did it.

Very few people go to the doctor when they have a cold they go to the theatre instead.

The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding the chin in doubt and the chin at bay.

There are five stages to an actor's career: who is Herschel Bernardi? get me Herschel Bernardi get me a Herschel Bernardi type get me a young Herschel Bernardi and who is Herschel Bernardi?

On stage I make love to twenty-five thousand people then I go home alone.

In Hollywood if you don't have happiness you send out for it.

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down unless you're a king.

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means a complexity of words movements gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

As an actor he should be an extra in police line-ups.

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.

A walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

An actor is a guy who if you ain't talking about him ain't listening.

An agent is a guy who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what he makes.

Bugs Bunny - the perfect employee. Never absent. Never late. Never changes the script. Doesn't have an agent. Never asks for a percent of the profit. Doesn't ask to have his relatives on the payroll.

In music the punctuation is absolutely strict the bars and the rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does straight to our emotions deep into the twilight room of the soul.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

The best audience is intelligent well-educated and a little drunk.

The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds come home to roost.

When the characters are really alive before their author the latter does nothing but follow them in their action in their words in the situations which they suggest to him.

Working in the theatre has a lot in common with unemployment.

There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.

Acting is not being emotional but being able to express emotion.

A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.

Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.

When actors begin to think it is time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

Opening night is the night before the play is ready to open.

An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

The live entertainment Canadians like most is the intimate review a collection of songs and sketches preferably with a satirical bias.

Acting is happy agony.

With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.

When the audience knows you know better it's satire but when they think you can't do any better it's corn.

The person who wants to make it has to sweat. There are no short cuts. And you've got to have the guts to be hated.

True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.

A fan club is a group of people who tell an actor he is not alone in the way he feels about himself.

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

Many plays certainly mine are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

You need three things in the theatre - the play the actors and the audience and each must give something.

From the point of view of the playwright then the essence of a tragedy or even of a serious play is the spiritual awakening or regeneration of his hero.

Hamlet is the tragedy of tackling a family problem too soon after college.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

The whole motivation for any performer is 'Look at me Ma.'

If you give audiences a chance they'll do half your acting for you.

Show business is like sex. When it's wonderful it's wonderful. But when it isn't very good it's still all right.

All the movies used to be 'colossal'. Now they're all 'frank'. I think I liked 'colossal' better.

Satire is what closes Saturday night.

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can't be much good.

By increasing the size of the keyhole today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

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.