I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.
Interpretation
Plays should give the audience just the right amount of information at the right moment, allowing for engagement and understanding.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard emphasizes the importance of timing and clarity in playwriting. He compares the careful balance of information given to the audience to Occam's razor, suggesting that like this philosophical principle, simplicity and precision in conveying the right details are vital for effective storytelling. A play should allow the audience to feel informed yet intrigued, ensuring that their experience is both enriching and engaging.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about effective storytelling techniques in theatre.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
A lot can be said with just a look, or the way the body moves. Each song is a different character. So each song takes on a different movement of the body. And the body has to go with the subject and the attitude that you have toward that subject.
Never play a thing the same way twice.
People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly.
Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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