Theatre Quotes

When the sun sets beautifully, other beauties rise. Nature is a theatre; when one great player leaves the scene, another great player immediately enters. The play always continues excellently.

An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.

How hard a thing 'twould be to please you all.

In London, theatregoers expect to laugh; in Paris, they wait grimly for proof that they should.

I'm an old-fashioned theatre major at heart.

I spent two years in the military service, then I trudged around in repertory for quite a while. I somehow wound up at the National Theatre, though, and then I was definitely on my way.

Statistically, it would be insanity to go into the theatre for money. According to the statistics, you should just stay home. The odds are just incredible.

It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.

American theatre, to me, represents zeroing down on what the need is to get inside the personal hearts of people. I think it's really beautiful if we can keep doing that instead of just fluffing everything up and hiding again.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

There are two impulses in theatre: to be frivolous or to make rules.

Working on a film, you don't get time to develop rivalries, but the theatre is like a little village, and the differences between me, Lionel and Georgia grew.

I knew nothing about film at all. I suppose the biggest surprise is all these things. In the theatre we sort of do, I might do two or three key interviews and that would be it.

There's such a sense of theatre in getting glammed up; it's like putting on a play or short film.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

Filmmakers need to give the audience that something extra, an incentive to spend money and go to the multiplex - the ticket prices are high. Otherwise they'd just stay home, buy DVDs or download movies. But if there were only big budget movies it would be impossible for the film industry to survive. So I emphasize the importance of mid-range films. But those films need the support of theatre owners. The theatre chains have to have the vision to realize the need to support smaller films for the growth of the domestic film industry.

The idea with theatre is to come to an environment that you enjoy.

I've always found it not only easy, but enjoyable. It's necessary for us to reach out and I'm speaking for myself here. I certainly have a sense of responsibility to reach out to these people in the theatre who might look to someone like me for some guidance.

I have mainly come from a theatre background, I did Oliver here I played the Artful Dodger and I did The Sound of Music.

I did theatre all my life and then went into the film world. I then kind of segued into TV land, which is a different experience.

The walk is like a matrix, like a diffuse, vague happening. It's like - imagine a play, a work of theatre, that is totally vague, almost devoid of details that consists in one person going on a walk. And as a consequence, there is a necessary tension between the determinacy and indeterminacy, the definite and the indefinite, of possibility.

I initially told people I wanted to be a dancer and ultimately a "Rockette." I didn't really know what a musical theatre performer was other than the Shirley Temple type.

I come alive when I have assisted in bringing out the printed word on the stage, you know, and I enjoy directing plays. It's a tactile process, theatre, unlike a number of other forms of the creative work.

I'd love to think that people in the future would gather in theatres, at conventions, and in darkened rooms, and read it out to each other.

I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

I was never the class clown or anything like that. When I was growing up and doing theatre in Seattle I was always doing very dramatic work... Now I can’t get a dramatic role to save my life!

I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft.

Any story that gets us thinking, and particularly young people, thinking why? Whether it's as a result of reading the book, or coming out of the theatre or the cinema, I think we should just simply be asking the question 'why'? Why did it happen to those people? Was it necessary? And anything that gets us thinking like that is really important.

The first time I came to London on my own, I was 15. I was absolutely oblivious to so many things. I had no expectations, no fears. I just came to do a National Youth Theatre season one summer. It was just brilliant.

I have a large personal collection of pictures. For every project, I choose images. Usually I don't do this until I've done an extensive script breakdown and distilled the text down to poetic form. I have to plant enough seeds so that there will be vibration.

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

It's so Canada. On some level, you laugh, but on another level, it's just depressing. We pride ourselves: We're not like the bad old U.S. where they had segregation, whites-only washrooms and hotels. We think we were the capital of the Underground Railroad, we were the place to where the slaves escaped, we were a much better country. But in fact, some of the black people in Canada at the time said, 'It's actually much easier in the United States because you know which hotels, restaurants, theatres won't let you in because the signs are there. In Canada, you never know.'

I did spend about 5 years in the Griffin Theatre Company in 1978 actually , and worked therefore about 5 years on a voluntary basis. This was very much as a amateur, doing things like mopping the floor, handling props, setting up scenery, etc. I never acted, and don't think I'm an actor, but those years in the theatre taught me a lot about professional theatre.

Of course the Disney movies, you know all the soundtracks, and anything Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were doing - Singing in the Rain was one of my favorite musicals I used to watch a lot because my mom came from a theatre background.

The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth - it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles.

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.

I did an internship at the Ardent theatre company in Philly after dropping out of college. I was earning $165 a week building sets and cleaning the toilets. Cleaning toilets is a good way of getting in touch with your creativity. That's when you find out if you got anything going on in your head.

Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

The idea for Anthem the play began over twenty years ago. I was assisting in the production of another Ayn Rand work, Ideal. I moved to New York and began working on producing the play with my partners. And as a way to raise money to cover some venture debt, we decided to stage Anthem for a limited run at the Lex Theatre in Hollywood.

If Anthem finds an audience in New York City, my hope would be to see the play transferred to a commercial theatre for an open-ended run.

Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.

. . I have written a couple of screenplays for studios, and each time has been less gratifying than the last. In my experience, they want no real representations of homosexuality, they want no complexity, they are terrified of ambiguity and unanswered questions - they don't know what they want, except that they want to make lots of money. The only freedom I've ever had as an artist has been in the theatre.

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.

We both [with Jo Andres] think that it is really important to our culture that we support all kinds of music, all kinds of theatre and all kinds of art because you never know what moves people. We've always believed that there should be a strong voice outside the commercial world. Certainly, the commercial world has a huge place in our culture and we also support that - but, we also want to support the stuff that lives outside of that.

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.'

Women became almost our bigger audience. Teenage girls went crazy for my movie. I saw it. I went to theatres all over and there were gangs of girls going and screaming. There were kids that were 10 or 11 years old when September 11 happened. They've been told for years they're going to get killed, they're going to get blown up. Every time you go on an airplane, X-ray your shoes because you're going to get blown up. Terror alert orange, don't travel. So, people have a reaction and they want to scream. Horror movies have become the new date movie.

There's a whole generation growing up thinking you shouldn't seek knowledge for its own sake, and that theatre and art and books are activities that you do after-hours, rather than things that are at the heart of life. That's a huge change.

Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing - all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art - at the door.

I love theatre - it's where I started - and I've directed a play myself. I'm not sure if I want to direct a film, but certainly, as an actress, I'm always thinking, 'Surely this must be my last film.'