Theatre Quotes

Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, politcal intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner.

An agent is a guy who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what he makes.

When the characters are really alive before their author the latter does nothing but follow them in their action in their words in the situations which they suggest to him.

If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.

How will the performer-audience interaction change, now that we are so used to participating in the lives of strangers?

Backstage was chaos distilled into a very small space.

Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection.

I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.

If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.

In any case, the goal is the same: to connect.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

The whole motivation for any performer is 'Look at me Ma.'

What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?Beatrice: Is it possible disdain should die while she hathsuch meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?

All the world's a stage.

When the audience knows you know better it's satire but when they think you can't do any better it's corn.

When you step from the wings onto the stage you go from total blackness to a blinding hot glare. After a moment you adjust, but there is that moment. like being inside lightning.

The best audience is intelligent well-educated and a little drunk.

Bugs Bunny - the perfect employee. Never absent. Never late. Never changes the script. Doesn't have an agent. Never asks for a percent of the profit. Doesn't ask to have his relatives on the payroll.

Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

A man stroking a dog’s head means the universe is stroking the universe; a child playing with a little dog means the universe is playing with the universe! If the universe is a theatre play, then we can be sure that there is only one player: The universe itself! Everything we see is the same player!

Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.

Satire is what closes Saturday night.

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

You have to understand your best. Your best isn't Barrymore's best or Olivier's best or my best, but your own. Every person has his norm. And in that norm every person is a star. Olivier could stand on his head and still not be you. Only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can reach what you can if you do it. So do it. We need your best, your voice, your body. We don't need for you to imitate anybody, because that would be second best. And second best is no better than your worst.

We number nothing that we spend for you;Our duty is so rich, so infinite,That we may do it still without accompt.Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,That we, like savages, may worship it.

True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.

I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing.

I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

You never get anywhere until you figure out the difference between passion and compassion.

He seems, in manner and rank, above the class of young men who take that turn; but I remember hearing them say, that the little theatre at Fairport was to open with the performance of a young gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.—If this should be thee, Lovel!—Lovel? yes, Lovel or Belville are just the names which youngsters are apt to assume on such occasions—on my life, I am sorry for the lad.

You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.

I AM the current curator of the black trunk and the stories it holds within.

That´s the problem with planning a late night supper after the opera, not only does the hero or the heroine die singing, but you end up famished after the last notes of the finale.

From the point of view of the playwright then the essence of a tragedy or even of a serious play is the spiritual awakening or regeneration of his hero.

People in America, they're getting dumber, they're getting less able to analyze something and think critically, and pick apart the underlying elements. And more and more ready to make a snap judgment regarding something at face value, which is too bad.

The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.

Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and y

Hamlet is the tragedy of tackling a family problem too soon after college.

There are five stages to an actor's career: who is Herschel Bernardi? get me Herschel Bernardi get me a Herschel Bernardi type get me a young Herschel Bernardi and who is Herschel Bernardi?

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means a complexity of words movements gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves.

Working in the theatre has a lot in common with unemployment.

I sometimes wish they would swagger more now buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and keep them rogues and vagabonds which is what at heart - bless 'em - they are.

The person who wants to make it has to sweat. There are no short cuts. And you've got to have the guts to be hated.

Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always "Stick 'em up!" In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising.

Theatre is a voyage into the archives of the human imagination

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

Acting is happy agony.

Once and for allthe idea of glorious victorieswon by the glorious armymust be wiped outNeither side is gloriousOn either side they're just frightened men messing their pantsand they all want the same thingNot to lie under the earthbut to walk upon itwithout crutches(Roux, act 1, scene 19)

Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in.

Actor-manager - one to whom the part is greater than the whole.

Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down unless you're a king.

There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.

[Cinema]… obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.

Show business is like sex. When it's wonderful it's wonderful. But when it isn't very good it's still all right.