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.
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men.
My films, I've tried to put a message into them. It's not about the gore; it's not about the horror element that are in them. It's more about the message, for me. That's what it is, and I'm using this platform to be able to show my feelings of what I think.
A musician is a professional, whether he or she is successful or not. The profession itself must be regarded as a stable job.
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
We shouldn't be copying what we see. We should try to find our own sense of style, to believe in ourselves.
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