THEATRE QUOTES II
quotations about theatre
Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.
ELEANOR CATTON
The Rehearsal
It's dwindled somewhat, because of money, because of changes in social attitudes, because of education. I don't think we have as much theatre in schools as we used to. If children aren't exposed to live theatre at a young age, it's not something that becomes part of their psyche.
MARK HADLOW
"Actor Mark Hadlow appointed officer of New Zealand Order of Merit", Stuff, June 5, 2017
Theatre is a way of showing us lives far beyond our own experience; but it lets us into those stories by reflecting our own lives.
MARK SHENTON
"Theatre diversity is blossoming, even if there are a few bad apples", The Stage, May 24, 2017
Theatre is a powerful art form, it teaches lessons about life, society and emotion and more importantly yourself.
ANASTASIA ROBERTS
"Theatre takes student to Beijing", Wairarapa Times-Age, June 2, 2017
I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.
EUGENE IONESCO
Notes and Counter Notes
I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.
TOM STOPPARD
interview, March 10, 1999
From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun.
BERTOLT BRECHT
A Short Organum for the Theatre
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.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
The theater's much the most difficult kind of writing for me, the most naked kind, you're so entirely restricted.... I find myself stuck with these characters who are either sitting or standing, and they've either got to walk out of a door, or come in through a door, and that's about all they can do.
HAROLD PINTER
interview, The Paris Review, fall 1966
The history of theatre is the history of first nights.
JOHN LAHR
Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton
I long for the simplicity of theatre. I want lessons learned, comeuppances delivered, people sorted out, all before your bladder gets distractingly full. That's what I want. What I know is what we all know, whether we'll admit it or not: every attempt to impose the roundness of a well-made play on reality produces a disaster. Life just isn't so, nor will it be made so.
JOHN M. FORD
Casting Fortune
The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
attributed, Profiles
Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.
VICTOR HUGO
Les Misérables
The fixation of the theater in one language--written words, music, lights, noises--betokens its imminent ruin.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
preface, The Theater and Its Double
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Collected Works
A stage play ought to be the point of intersection between the visible and invisible worlds, or, in other words, the display, the manifestation of the hidden.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
La Parodie, L'Invasion
The theater is a humble materialist enterprise which seeks to produce riches of the imagination, not the other way around. The theater is an event, not an object. Theatre workers need not blush and conceal their desperate struggle to pay the landlords their rents. Theater without the stink of art.
CHARLES LUDLAM
The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam
Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramatic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurrences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, political intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner.
E. A. BUCCHIANERI
Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
All theatre is political -- just as all other activities of human beings are political -- because theatre is not autonomous and must thus decide whose interests it serves.
FRANCES BABBAGE
Augusto Boal
Given technological developments in virtual reality and communications, it is not clear what, if any, purpose will be served by live theatre in the not-too-distant future. Postmodern theory sees theatre as a quaint and marginalized activity in a wired world, and ... whether live theatre even really exists anymore. Some of you may dream of seeing your name up in lights on a theatre marquee, but if you are really looking for fame and fortune shouldn't you be studying film at least, or television arts, or computers? What is it about theatre that remains compelling for you? Is it just because it's there?
MARK FORTIER
Theory Theatre and Introduction