Quotes About Theatre

I went to an Arts High School, so everyone there was kind of anti-clique, though they still happened. I guess I was in the theatre-dork clique. Not to be confused with the musical-theatre-dork clique.

I like to connect with the other actors in a fantasy situation.

I just absolutely needed the theatre so desperately - it was my fate; it was where I was running towards. It was the place where I found peace and survival and all kinds of things.

It's tough and it should be tough - it should never be easy to be given millions of pounds to make a drama. The coalition government is doing terrible things to the BBC, but drama will survive even if we end up putting on a play in a backroom of a pub.

Theatre's great. It's such an act of faith. It's a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It's a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That's why I love the theatre.

With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It's totally OK to have one actor playing five roles - people are willing to believe that. But they won't believe it if there's a black or an Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us?

Very often, as an actress, there's some kind of stereotype, but with any good script, you should be able to swap the genders of all the characters, and it shouldn't make a huge difference.

I come from theatre and there have been roles where my job was to stand in the corner, with a sword in my hands, for two hours. And I was happy doing that.

Film directors don't come to the theatre in Sydney. In London and New York, they do.

A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line, while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, 'Take your time.'

I understudied Colm Feore quite a bit in '85 and '86 - 'Persephone' and 'The Boys from Syracuse,' too - and that was great, great training for me. He was and he is an amazing theatre actor.

So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.

Les représentations théâtrales, elles aussi, sont enracinées dans la violence collective et ce sont des espèces de rites, mais plus nettoyés encore de leur violence que les sacrifices animaux, et plus riches sur le rapport culturel, puisque ce sont toujours, au moins indirectement, des méditations sur l'origine du religieux et de la culture tout entière, des sources potentielles de savoir.

Run all the way to the end of the episode, float back down into the theatre, float into the movie, and then run it backward so everybody walks backward and talks backward, and throw in a little circus music so it's as ridiculous as it could be. Then, clear your mind for ten minutes and then go back and think of what you were afraid of. You will be amazed to discover that your fear has severely diminished if not disappeared entirely.

Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage.

There's a reason why movie theatres don't encourage people to bring their goats.

I was so scared of going back to the theatre after Hamlet. I didn't know if I'd do a play again because I was afraid of the power of it.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

It was time to use the audio medium to look into the future once again, and the opportunity was taken by The Firesign Theatre to transport its fans to The Future Fair, which introduced a new generation to the fast-arriving Digital Age. "I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus" (1971) took its listeners into the Hard Disk of Darkness

I want only dead actors. That way there'll be no jealousy.

The avant-garde no longer simply attempts, as it always must, to carry out transformations within an inherited medium; it claims it is creating a medium of its own, sometimes retaining the old name of theatre, sometimes preferring others: spectacle, show, performance.

A future historian of theatre, impressed by recent pronouncements on the state of drama and stage, might call the past two decades, give or take a few years, the Time of Great Experiments. Or, the Age of Transition, during which theatre, as it has been known in the West since the ancient Greeks, finally changed into something different that still might be named theatre, but then might not.

But theatre is also a public event, a spectacle or a show, attempting to please or amaze the audience by a display of exceptional stage achievements, that is, special performances. In that sense, like sporting events or the circus, theatre serves what I shall call the performance function: it satisfies our natural desire to achieve or witness something extraordinary.

My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.