Explore Quotes on Theatre

Theatre artists are essentially sort of charlatans and thieves, I mean that's the tradition that we come from, so I have absolutely no, I make no bones about the fact that I steal from here and I take from there, and we all do it, that's perfectly all right, that's the nothing, there's nothing new in the world, there's nothing actually new in the way that you do something, but the point is is how do you take something and use it to articulate what is essentially a core of any given theatrical production.

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare.

Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.

What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

Music has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul, and if it has the power to do this, it is clear that the young must be directed to music and must be educated in it.

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.

Relentlessly pursue perfection knowing we won't catch it, but in the process we'll achieve excellence.

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.

I would like to be going all over the kingdom...and acting everywhere. There's nothing in the world equal to seeing the house rise at you, one sea of delightful faces, one hurrah of applause!

As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish.

Every character is a part of you and a part of the character that you are going to evolve into that you are not yet.

Everyone has an opportunity to be great because everyone has an opportunity to serve.

In the theatre the audience want to be surprised - but by things that they expect.

There is that smaller world which is the stage, and that larger stage which is the world.

Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be.

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

You need three things in the theatre - the play, the actors and the audience, and each must give something.

I hate that people think going to the theatre is a special occasion. I wish people would treat it as normally as going to the cinema.