THEATRE QUOTES III
quotations about theatre
Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.
VICTOR HUGO
Les Misérables
No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.
KENNETH TYNAN
"Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingiest Gadfly", New York Times, January 9, 1966
The play was a great success, but the audience was a failure.
OSCAR WILDE
attributed, Encore
The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.
WILL ROGERS
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
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
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
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
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
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
I have never regarded any theater as much more than the conclusion to a dinner or the prelude to a supper.
MAX BEERBOHM
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
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
I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium.
KENNETH TYNAN
letter to George Devine, March 10, 1964
The history of theatre is the history of first nights.
JOHN LAHR
Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton
The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the bother of talk after dinner.
MARY MCCARTHY
Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue
Applause begets applause in the theatre, as laughter begets laughter and tears beget tears.
CLAYTON HAMILTON
Theory of the Theatre
It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman.
TALLULAH BANKHEAD
Tallulah: My Autobiography
There is something wrong when I go to the theatre whose province is the world and instead of being brought closer to the world I am cut off from it.
JULIAN BECK
The Life of the Theatre
With a play, when the curtain goes up and people are in garbage cans, I know I may admire the idea cerebrally, but it won't mean as much to me. I've seen Beckett, along with many lesser avant-gardists, and many contemporary plays, and I can say yes, that's clever and deep but I don't really care. But when I watch Chekhov or O'Neill--where it's men and women in human, classic crises--that I like.
WOODY ALLEN
The Paris Review, fall 1995