Theatre Quotations | Page 4

I don't profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.

I figured as I got older, the good roles for women would be in the theatre. So 15 years ago I started building a Broadway career to try and develop the chops to be accepted as a great theatrical actress

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.

I come from the theatre, my bones are in the theatre; it’s as natural as breathing to want to be in the theatre

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

I had great faith in Irish actors, that they'd be hip to the whole theatre thing, and they are. I had no illusions of coming over here as some kind of big shot. It's been a learning experience for me too.

What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story.

I think in the old days, everybody used to act really quickly because Hollywood was built by theatre people.

An actor is supposed to emulate life. Instead, alas, many are imitating other actors. You don't fashion your knowledge of theatre or your approach to a role on the basis of what other actors have done. This kind of thinking is a great danger, especially in dealing with TV producers who frequently say things like, 'This is a Sean Connery type.'

I love England, the people, the parks, the theatre.

Being a film actor is very different from a theatre actor.

I don't know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you're losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot.

Judi Dench and Ian McKellen taught me how to work hard and respect the theatre.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

The last time I heard real screaming in the theatre was when I went to see a movie I did years ago, called 'Wait Until Dark.' Now, my mother was the least emotional person on the planet, but when I got killed in the movie, she stood up and screamed, 'That's my son!' At Radio City Music Hall in New York!

The great difference between screen acting and theatre acting is that screen acting is about reacting - 75% of the time, great screen actors are great reactors.

I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.

Theatres are built because they were the boards for entertainment.

The roles for women in theatre are much better than they are in film.

When we'd suggested doing it, the Theatre Royal management had said, 'Nobody wants to see Waiting for Godot.' As it happened, every single ticket was booked for every single performance, and this confirmation that our judgment was right was sweet. Audiences came to us from all over the world. It was amazing.

Mum did a lot of commercial theatre and farces in the 1980s and '90s to make sure the school bills were paid.

My experiences in film and theatre in the States have been much more rigorous-in England there's an environment of, Let's try this.

I have done film, television and theatre - all at a pretty substantial level - I don't think it's possible for American actors to do that.

I had been nine years in the theatre and hadn't had massive success. My only thing was I wanted to be an actor and I didn't care when, where, or how much for.

There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, theyve forgotten that, and they leave going, Wow - what an amazing play.

The people who enjoy classical music, opera, even classical ballet, would come to classical theatre if it were well-acted and imaginatively presented.

We are proud to have brought this exciting week of live theater to the families of our state for the past nine years. The diversity and excellence of our performing artists has added immeasurably to the success of this program. We are determined to give every child the opportunity to see a live performance, and we hope they will continue to make attendance at the theatre a part of their lives as they become young adults.

we are pleased to announce that we have an agreement to sell the Fifth Avenue Cinemas to Festival Cinemas. This is the second theatre sale we have announced since completing the acquisition of Famous Players on July 22, 2005.

Yes, in a way. Film is a by-product of my love of theatre. Theatre is for me the greater challenge. In many ways it requires more skill.

I left school with no qualifications, but I was doing theatre and film work and thought that was the best thing since sliced bread.

A fan once stopped me outside a theatre and gave me as a gift a signed photograph of Sir Laurence Olivier. It was strange, but nice, too.

To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

Getting the call to be in The Goblet of Fire was like being welcomed into the most exclusive upper circle of some elite actors' club. You sit on set with the cream of the National Theatre and the RSC, all clutching wands or wearing witches' hats.

Musical theatre is something I'm familiar with, I've been doing that.

Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.

Don't expect the theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them.

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.

Sin is what is new, strong, surprising, strange. The theatre must take an interest in sin if the young are to be able to go there.

From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun.

Nothing is forever in the theatre. Whatever it is, it's here, it flares up, burns hot, and then it's gone.

Of all the London theatres, the Donmar is the dream.

Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.

I've learned, having been on a lot of sets, the good news is that by definition you are surrounded by experts. They get fired if they're not - unlike in the theatre!

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.

Scottish Theatre's greatest success story of recent times.

I think the writer's quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I'd have thought, slightly more risky.

Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.

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

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

Theatre is immediate gratification

We do not go to the theatre like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it.

What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still today, is lustre--a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular, symmetrical. However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones.

Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.

I got the O.B.E because I represent England outside of England more...but thinking of me as an actor, I haven't done all the classical theatre, all the great roles. Think of Helen Mirren and me. Helen, who I adore, is a friend - should be Dame. I am the rebel, the revolutionary on the side.

I'd like more kids to go and see theatre because it really is amazing.

I began playing Branson during the 1992 season and was a little amazed. There were about 30 celebrity theatres there and more are being added all the time.

Never not dare to hang yourself. That's the only way you grow in your profession. You must continually attempt things that you think are beyond you, or you get into a complete rut.

All movies in China are censored. Out of 600 movies produced in China, only 60 are allowed to show in theatres.

I've never quite understood the idea of a "season." Whenever an artistic director says to me, 'I have this slot,' I always start to feel we're parking cars or something.

I trained as a theatre actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.

In the theater, I've found that, in general, reaction and laughter come easier at an evening performance, when the audience is more inclined to forget its troubles. Matinee customers must enter the theatre in a more matter-of-fact frame of mind, hanging on tightly before they let themselves go.

What I like about theatre is the responsibility you have with your character.

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.

If the nature of human experience changes with the color of a man's skin, then the racists have been right all along.

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.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

I feel so sorry for younger actors who aren't able to have the opportunities that I had, starting out in repertory theatre. It's really tough on young actors now.

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.

Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business.

The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.

I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.

I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines.

Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?

I gave my life to the Group Theatre, because in it I'm building something for myself. What I build, I am.

Im now projecting my career in a totally different direction. I am going to work less-way less. And I want to work better. I want to direct again, I want to do more theatre, and I want to do exactly those movies that I want to do.

We had a food store at the theatre and I used to pinch food. I pinched some trousers and shirts to keep me going but they would wear out. I was virtually on the breadline.

We are not allowed and are unwilling to kick anybody out. The theatre is available for student-run productions and the sentiment at Swat is that these are just as important as any other event, regardless of how much money it costs.

But I think theatre in a repressive society is an immensely exciting event and theatre in a luxurious old, affluent old society like ours is an entertaining event.

There are people within the RFU who are well aware of the implications. It is tremendous theatre but, as certain owners have said to me, hangings are exciting as long as you're not the person getting hanged. It's something we've got to sit down and talk about. Anything is on the table.

The only way we are going to sustain audience interest in theatre is to ensure that we attract quality new entrants on an ongoing basis.

We hope to develop packages with the Kentucky Center and Actors Theatre and the museums where people can come to Louisville for a weekend and stay here and walk everywhere.

When I was 11, even though we were poor, my mother was a fan of movies from the west. She used to bring me to the theatre. At that time, a parent could bring a child to the theatre for free. I was fascinated by the musicals, I think they influenced me the most. Also a lot of Fred Astaire... I loved movies and I wanted to be a filmmaker some day.

Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.

This is the bud of being, the dim dawn, The twilight of our day, the vestibule; Life's theatre as yet is shut, and death, Strong death, alone can heave the massy bar, This gross impediment of clay remove, And make us embryos of existence free.

Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public. . . . The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise.

The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.

I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

With theatre especially, you don't want to do it unless you love it - there's no way you can pull it off, making people happy, making yourself happy for 12 weeks or whatever.

Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theatre?

We didn't have a movie theatre until I was about nine, so I just didn't see them. But, once I got into movies I loved them.

Theatre and opera were always the twin kingdoms that I felt I had to conquer, because they were my parents' favorites.