Best 631 quotes in «theatre quotes» category

The Magician makes the visible, invisible. The Scientist makes the invisible, visible. The Artist stands in between, indivisible.

The midgets acted all of the tragedies and many of the comedies. They acted them all at once, and it was fortunate that Tetrahedron had so many faces, otherwise he might have died of fatigue. They acted them all at once, and the emperor, walking round his theatre, could see them all at once, if he wished. Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

There’s nothing that makes me cry harder than fiction. There’s nothing that makes me weep, nothing that holds my breath and brings tears stinging to my eyes more than fiction. And all those sad realities which filter through my days. They leave no lasting impression. All they serve is small reminders of my busy life. Small purposes: remember the pain of the world. Okay, alright. I remember it all. Then I go watch a movie. I listen to the classical music station in my car at five-thirty pm where they always play that same song. I watch a play, watch the performance. Watch the smoke descend upon the stage. This fiction. It’s the only thing that affects me. Funny, isn’t it?

These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye...

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.

The theatre is a machine of transformations: everything is transformed into another thing; a bald man has thick hair on his head; a man with strong legs gains a limp and a sharp-eyed person becomes blind; an actor who is an atheist immediately turns into the most pious priest on earth! ~

the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's like éternel retour, it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.’ 'You do, then, fall in love.’ 'Only with fictions, I love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there’s waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start.

The Theatre of the Absurd, in the sense that it is truly the contemporary theatre, facing as it does man's condition as it is, is the Realistic theatre of our time; and that the supposed Realistic theatre—the term used here to mean most of what is done on Broadway—in the sense that it panders to the public need for self-congratulation and reassurance and presents a false picture of ourselves to ourselves is … really and truly The Theatre of the Absurd.

Thi enhver Skribent kand nu agere Comoedie Skriver og ingen frygter at see sit Arbeide spildt, i hvor mavert, elendigt og ilde sammenhængende det end er naar han tager den Præcaution at det endes med Sang og Dantz, hvilket man og seer at vor Alders Autores nøye i agttage. Man seer heraf, at en forderved Smag ogsaa har sin Nytte i Verden, og at det, som jeg derom skiemteviis har skrevet udi mine Moralske Tanker er ikke gandske ugrundet.

The trick to loneliness is to spend a lot of time inside one’s head.

THE VOICE OF SALOME: Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood?... Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love... They say that love hath a bitter taste... But what matter? What matter? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth.

This simple theatre production had caused the Great American Ruckus of the century. How would the chaos pan out? Would there be public drama, hair-raising speeches, epic face-offs or brawls? And what of the Patriot Protesters? Would they commit self-immolation, shave their heads or do running cartwheels outside the premises? Would there be attempts at sabotage?

Voglio solo che sia chiaro che..." bisbigliò, direttamente al mio orecchio. Trattenni il respiro. "Quando ti bacio... quando ti sfioro... quando ti tocco... sono io. E voglio te.

This was awkward to infinity. Alex living here would change my entire routine. I was sharing a bathroom with my boyfriend. How scary was that? I had tampons and pads and everything in there. He was going to be naked in the shower on the other side of my bedroom wall. And I was going to be naked in the shower with him in my house.

...tilstaaer jeg gierne, at Charactererne ere outrerede udi visse Stykker; men maa derhos sige, at Agt er skeed af heel beraad Hu, og af en pur Fornødenhed, saasom jeg saavel som andre af Erfarenhed haver mærket, at Skuespill uden outrerede Characterer, eller uden det, som Academiske Censores ansee som Feil, ingen Virkning have.

Tranquilla, miciotta. Sarò un fidanzato modello" ammiccò. Sarebbe finita in tragedia.

This was our last night. We only had one curtain call, Bree. And I thought they were going to give us a standing ovation, but no-o-o-. Do you know why half the audience stood up?" "To get a head start on the traffic," Bree said. "To get a head start on the traffic," Antonia agreed in indignation. "I mean, here we are, dancing and singing our little guts out, and all those folks want to do is get to bed early. I ask you, whatever happened to common courtesy? Whatever happened to decent manners? Doesn't anyone care about craft anymore? And on top of that, it's not even nice.

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.

We are reaching levels of high experiential comfort and our standards will keep rising. We want to feel, we want to experience, we want to connect, we want intelligence, and we want to play; Ladies and Gentlemen: A new theatre is on its way.

We know the Arts are the archives of our human history, the wind of invention and the heartbeat of humanity

What are all the thoughts rattling in your mind when you're not listening to the answers to questions you ask?" -Jo, Boom

When you're in a show, all through rehearsals Tech Week hovers out there like a magical holy grail. In reality, Tech Week is always a train wreck of missed cues, forgotten lines, malfunctioning set pieces and short tempers.

What I wear on and off stage is my mask. You see, a mask doesn't hide you, it exposes you.

What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop...

When a show ends, for a few days, my body sizzles with leftover energy, like a tree in the wake of a lightning strike.

When I’m given a role, the first thing I do is read the play over and over again. I scour the script and write down everything the character says about himself and everything that everyone else says about him. I immerse myself in my character and imagine what it might be like to be that person. When I played Cassio in Othello I imagined what it would be like to be a lieutenant in the Venetian navy in 1604. I sat down with Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor and together we decided that Othello, Iago and Cassio had soldiery in their bones. I took from the script that Cassio was talented and ambitious, with no emotional or physical guard - and that’s how I played the part. For me, acting is about recreating the circumstances that would make me feel how my character is feeling. In the dressing room, I practise recreating those circumstances in my head and I try to not get in the way of myself. For example, in act two of Othello, when Cassio is manipulated to fight Roderigo and loses his rank, some nights I would burst into tears; other nights I wouldn’t but I would still feel the same emotion, night after night. Just as in life, the way we respond to catastrophe or death will be different every time because the process is unconscious. By comparison, in Chekhov’s Ivanov I played the young doctor, Lvov. Lvov was described as “a prig and a bigot … uprightness in boots … tiresome … completely sincere”. His emotions were locked away. I worked around the key phrase: “Forgive me, I’m going to tell you plainly.” I practised speaking gravely and sincerely without emotion and I actually noticed how that carried over into my personal life: when I played the open-hearted Cassio, I felt really free; when I played the pent-up Lvov, I felt a real need to release myself from the shackles of that character. It’s exhilarating to act out the emotions of a character - it’s a bit like being a child again. You flex the same muscles that you did when you pretended to be a cowboy or a policeman: acting is a grown-up version of that with more subtlety and detail. You’re responding with real emotions to imaginary situations. When I’m in a production I never have a day when I haven’t laughed, cried or screamed. There are times when I wake up stiff from emotional exhaustion. Film is a much more intimate and thoughtful medium than theatre because of the proximity of the camera. The camera can read your thoughts. On stage, if you have a moment of vulnerability you can hide it from the other actors; on film, the camera will see you feel that emotion and try to suppress it. Similarly, if you’re pretending to feel something that isn’t there, it won’t be believable.

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.

When you snatch happiness in little bits, fits and starts, and lose it, like me, you become coarse, little by little, you become hateful.

Without writers, stories would not be written, Without actors, stories could not be brought to life.

Acting is an everlasting search for truth.

A career in the theatre demands so much commitment.

Acting in theatre or television or screen is only for the irrecoverably diseased, those so smitten with the need that there is no choice.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over.

Acting's entertainment. It's not brain surgery.

Acting is the art of speaking in a loud, clear voice and the avoidance of bumping into the furniture.

Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.

Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.

Actually, my favourite roles have been in theatre, but on TV, my faves were Slap Maxwell and Larry Sanders.

Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.

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.

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

Acting is experience with something sweet behind it.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.

A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.

A play has two authors, the playwright and the actor.

A few years later, my Uncle David took me to the Earle Theatre to hear Duke Ellington.