The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.
Interpretation
Staging a text transforms it from an ideal concept into a tangible experience.
This quote by Tom Stoppard emphasizes the transformation that occurs when a literary work is performed. The staging process alters the original abstract nature of the text, making it a real and dynamic event that engages the audience and brings the text to life in a way that is distinctly different from reading it in its raw form.
In practice
In a discussion about the significance of live performances, you can use this quote to illustrate how staging changes a text.
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.
What's so powerful about the Psalms are, as well as they're being gospel and songs of praise, they are also the blues.
Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.
Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
I had composed songs, I sang, and played the vina. Practising this music I arrived at a stage where I touched the music of the spheres. Then every soul became a musical note, and all life became music. Inspired by it I spoke to the people, and those who were attracted by my words listened to them instead of listening to my songs.
I carry my thoughts about me for a long time, often a very long time, before I write them down; meanwhile my memory is so faithful that I am sure never to forget, not even in years, a theme that has once occurred to me.
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