Quotes on Theatre

Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

An actor is part illusionist, part artist, part ham.

Theatre is not supposed to represent psychology but passions, which is totally different. Its role is to represent the soul's different emotional states, and those of the mind, the world history.

The stage play is a trial, not a deed of violence. The soul is opened, like the combination of a safe, by means of a word. You don't require an acetylene torch.

To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.

A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you-trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.

Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good.

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.

Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.

In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.

To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.

The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.

The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.

Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it.

The arts inform as well as stimulate; they challenge as well as satisfy. Their location is not limited to galleries, concert halls and theatres. Their home can be found wherever humans chose to have attentive and vita intercourse with life itself.

I will accept anything in the theatre . . . provided it amuses or moves me. But if it does neither, I want to go home.

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

Many things shaped my identity as a young boy: a strong selfworth (something that was instilled in all three Barrowman siblings by our parents), my immersion in theatre and music, and my DNA. I was born gay. It's not a choice I – or anyone else who is gay – made. If it were, why on earth would anyone choose to be part of a minority, part of a group that in so many cultures and countries, even in the twenty-first century, is regularly blasphemed, hounded and worse?