Quotes About Theatre

This included the famous tale Cavalleria rusticana, later adapted by Verga for the theatre, this adaptation then being used as the basis for the libretto of Mascagni's opera.

Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives.

My grandparents met each other in amateur theatre. My uncle is an actor.

Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look.

Why did I want to become a director? I just had an early interest. My uncle was an actor in a local community theatre, and he ultimately persuaded me and a buddy of mine to come to that theatre, and we went to meet girls, and that turned into interested in kind of behind-the-scenes things, and from that point on, I was focused.

When I had started commuting into London for theatre school, I'd had to sell my uncle's stamp collection for £300.

My whole family is very artistic - my uncles are all actors and theatre directors.

As an actor, I always think that if someone does pick up a phone during a performance, something dire must be happening in their lives that is more important than theatre - some kind of tragedy they were attending to, or something. It's very uncomfortable if you don't know why they would pick up a phone and talk in the middle of a show.

Characters in TV and theatre tend to experience a lot of conflict, so I push myself through sport to physical and emotional levels that hurt so I've some other reference for extreme experience that isn't me shouting at my girlfriend or my mum. It's a way of controlling the uncontrollable.

Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.

It's really a grand old, legendary theatre where the spirits of like Judy Garland and all these great performers have been. The clubs are way more underground.

Theatre is really difficult, so it's important that you have a director that kind of understands that and is really hands on.

I think maybe the most important thing that we have to say is that people don't often talk about network executives being brave. You don't talk about them as having integrity and a higher purpose, because it's a job... except for Bob Greenblatt. He is a theatre person. He loves and understands it.

Maybe six months out of drama school, I was working at the Dundee Rep Theatre, I worked there for about a year, and I had an audition for the National Theatre of Scotland. I went into the audition room and when I came out I realized my fly was undone. I did this whole dramatic speech with my fly hanging low.

British acting is undoubtedly based in text, and American acting relies more on behavior. That's speaking very generally.

When I started out, I wanted to be Billy Joel. The plan was to be a singer-songwriter of that ilk, and, then, I got waylaid - that's probably an unfair way to say it - from being a rock star by the musical theatre stuff, which I love doing.

Whether you are a writer or an actor or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else.

'Blackbird' is the only one I've ever wanted to redo. It just haunted me, this play. There was a sense of unfinished business because at the time we did it at Manhattan Theatre Club, there was real momentum to move it to Broadway.

I don't want to feel what I'm creating on film has an outcome that is preordained. I don't think of the world as a place with a divinity that shapes our end. What you try to do with film is create, as far as you possibly can, an unfolding present - a theatre in which an outcome happens and is tested.

I've got a soft spot for Theatr Colwyn because my granddad used to run the Colwyn amateur dramatic society in the 1930s.

Performing on stage is my first love - it's why I wanted to be an actor in the first place - and 'Arcadia' is the highlight of my career so far. I love the intimacy of a live theatre audience - you can really squeeze every last drop out of each scene.

The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.

'What's the Use' is normally done with all the women onstage with Julie. Sometimes it's staged as a 'lay at my feet, dear children, and let me tell you the ways of life.' We felt like that wasn't really what was going on.

I've done everything in the theatre except marry a property man.