THEATRE QUOTES II
quotations about theatre
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
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
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
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
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
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Collected Works
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 collective act of Doublethink: We know those people on stage aren't the people they're saying they are ... yet, at the same time, our hearts are breaking for the people they are pretending to be.
DUNCAN MACMILLAN
"A new vision of Big Brother opens in Adelaide", The Advertiser, May 12, 2017
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
Participation in the creative processes of theatre is the best way to reveal the human being, and through this to understand one's self and one's society.
FRANCES BABBAGE
Augusto Boal
No, no, no; the theatre is not a house of evil repute, nor are its followers evil doers: the theatre is a temple where the beautiful is always worshipped; it makes a continuous appeal to the higher senses and natural passions. In this temple vice is punished, and virtue rewarded; the great social problems are presented. In this temple instruction is less abstract, and, therefore, more profitable for the crowd. The apostles of this temple are full of faith and courage; they have the souls of missionaries marching always toward the ideal.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Idol of Paris
It is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
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 am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art, and is content to address itself to coteries, however "high-browed."
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
For all its flaws and demands, for all its stupidities, the theater will outlive all the mechanical contraptions schemed to ape it.
TALLULAH BANKHEAD
Tallulah: My Autobiography
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
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
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
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.
IRIS MURDOCH
The Sea, the Sea