Best 631 quotes in «theatre quotes» category

Estragon: Acaba beraber olmasaydık ikimiz için de daha hayırlı olmaz mıydı? (sahneyi baştan başa geçer, tümseğe oturur.) Aynı yolun yolcuları değiliz aslında. Vladimir: (kızmadan) Orası belli değil. Estragon: Doğru, hiçbir şey belli değil. (Vladimir sahneyi baştan başa geçer, Estragon'un yanına oturur.) Vladimir: Her zaman ayrılabiliriz; bizim için daha iyi olacağına inanıyorsan. Estragon: Artık değmez. (sessizlik) Vladimir: Doğru, artık değmez. (sessizlik) Estragon: Eee, gidelim mi? Vladimir: Evet, gidelim. (Kımıldamazlar.)

Et voilà. Maintenant le ressort est bandé. Cela n'a plus qu'à se dérouler tout seul. C'est cela qui est commode dans la tragédie. On donne le petit coup de pouce pour que cela démarre, rien, un regard pendant une seconde à une fille qui passe et lève les bras dans la rue, une envie d'honneur un beau matin, au réveil, comme de quelque chose qui se mange, une question de trop qu'on se pose un soir… C'est tout. Après, on n'a plus qu'à laisser faire. On est tranquille. Cela roule tout seul. C'est minutieux, bien huilé depuis toujours. La mort, la trahison, le désespoir sont là, tout prêts, et les éclats, et les orages, et les silences, tous les silences : le silence quand le bras du bourreau se lève à la fin, le silence au commencement quand les deux amants sont nus l'un en face de l'autre pour la première fois, sans oser bouger tout de suite, dans la chambre sombre, le silence quand les cris de la foule éclatent autour du vainqueur - et on dirait un film dont le son s'est enrayé, toutes ces bouches ouvertes dont il ne sort rien, toute cette clameur qui n'est qu'une image, et le vainqueur, déjà vaincu, seul au milieu de son silence…

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

Every creative act involves a leap into the void. The leap has to occur at the right moment and yet the time for the leap is never prescribed. In the midst of a leap, there are no guarantees. To leap can often cause acute embarrassment. Embarrassment is a partner in the creative act—a key collaborator.

Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the shampoo and the soda pop and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it's all nice and pretty and LIKABLE. Everything is fun in the sun! Where's the discernment? Where's the arbitration that separates what I LIKE from what I RESPECT, what I deem WORTHY, what has... listen to me now... SIGNIFICANCE.

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

God is fucking stealing souls again!

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door. His name, as I ought to have told you before, Is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus. His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake, And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake. Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats — But no longer a terror to mice or to rats. For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime; Though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time. And whenever he joins his friends at their club (which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub) He loves to regale them, if someone else pays, With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days. For he once was a Star of the highest degree — He has acted with Irving, he's acted with Tree. And he likes to relate his success on the Halls, Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls. But his grandest creation, as he loves to tell, Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.

Find a good teacher, don't betray yourself to succeed and be a better person before being a better actor.

He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures:——but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm.

Hélas ! faut-il que l'amour, si doux en apparence, soit si tyrannique et si cruel à l'épreuve !

He quite certainly shouldn't care: and still he feels a hot sick bubbling in his gut, as if he'd drunk turned milk, or been on a drunken spree. Or been spurned in love, since damn fools seem to take that uncommonly serious, and stick knives in their guts over it all the time, in poems and plays. Romeo and Juliet, being one example, that he's read half a dozen times but never thought to see played out on the stage. Except that Ree took it into his head not a month ago, to take him to the theatre at Stratford to see it. The play's practically seditious when you think about it: Shakespeare's tale of forbidden love between a free-born human lad, and the high-born wolf-girl from the family that had owned then freed his father. At least old Will didn't go so far as to make the boy a slave, else he'd probably have found himself clapped in irons for thanks for his labour. Though of course as a wolf himself, for all his relatively low-status till he won fame from his quill, he'd less to fear than a human would have had. And even a wolf audience can sigh and dab their eyes over a tragic romance, between the two classes of men. As long as the powerless class gets no ideas of acting on that offensive gush of sentimentality.

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.

He often expressed his amazement...at the power of theatre to transfigure a play, and inject it with significances he could never have imagined without it: yet for all that, he did not change custom or become a theatregoer, and this...was a part of the price he had to pay for a habit of Protestantism.

He put a fresh sheet in and, after spending a few moments wishing he were doing something quite different, typed: Gregory: But this is really qutie farcical. Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed: (Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are "underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action" like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like "Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory" or putting any more expression into it than as if you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after "quite" or saying "fusskle" instead of "farcical".) Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed: Gregory: You're just pulling my leg.

God forbid the goyim think ladies who work the street are human beings! God forbid the goyim think that Jewish ladies love each other as human beings!

I am amazed all over again by how magnified this project's importance has become, far beyond its being a play or an artwork. It is now a test of some kind; but of what, precisely? The incommunicability of the Chinese? If I can't claim to know my actors, I know them as well or as little as I would an American cast. I can no longer call up the notion of Chinese mysteriousness.

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

I am interested in the shape of ideas, even if I do not believe in them

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

I believe in stories that are non-linear, as we are (hopefully)

I feel as if I could be any thing or every thing, as if I could rant and storm, or sigh, or cut capers in any tragedy or comedy in the English language.

I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.

If you spend a hundred bucks, or more, to go to the theatre, something should happen to you. Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values, or about the way you think about things. Maybe you should come out of the theatre, something haven happened to you. Maybe you should be changing, or thinking about changing. But if you just go there, and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted a hundred bucks.

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

If you spend a hundred bucks, or more, to go to the theatre, something should happen to you. Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values, or about the way you think about things. Maybe you should come out of the theatre, something having happened to you. Maybe you should be changing, or thinking about changing. But if you just go there, and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted a hundred bucks.

I had loved poetry and the theatre. Now I loved adventure more.

Il mio cactus ha il reggiseno.

I have Shakespeared my Moliere to Tenessee, and I am Wild for Becket! But I got a little tired of the redundancy.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you." In short, entertainment fulfills our expectations. Art, on the other hand, makes no compromise for public taste as it inspires us to consider life's complexities and ambiguities. Art is the opposition testing the strength of societal and cultural values-values that are thoughtlessly adopted by the mass of individuals living unexamined lives and all who cannot imagine a different way of seeing life.

I love it when you go to see something, and you enter as an individual, and you leave as a group. Because you've all been bound together by the same experience.

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

In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces. Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.

In 1908, the great Russian actress Alla Nazimova played Nora in New York in performances that became legendary. In the audience was Halvdan Koht, who describes Nazimova in the last scene acting “with a passionate intensity that made Nora’s transformation at the end completely an inner reality, conveyed in low-pitched, emotion-laden words” (K 323). Koht recalls his horror when members of the audience, mistaking “the work of art” for “a collection of ideas,” began to applaud Nora’s every line “as though it were a political harangue” (K 323). But while not a harangue, Nora’s words are nevertheless resoundingly political, for in representing the “inner reality” of an obscure Norwegian housewife, they constitute a discourse of recognition for every woman who has ever lived her life for a man, and by Nora’s count, there are “millions.” Displaying what the modern theatre condemns as bad manners, the 1908 audience was responding to Ibsen’s powerful feminist poetry, the exhilarating promise that on the other side of the doll house, women, no less then men, could learn to take themselves seriously: “I believe that, before all else, I’m a human being, no less than you — or anyway, I ought to try to become one” (193). The universality of A Doll House does not come from “its demand for truth in every human relation” (K 323), but in its demand for equality in the relation between women and men.

I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage.

It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings—the actor must be able to convert them into living terms.

Ingen kand dømme om et Skuespill, uden den der haver udstuderet et Theatrum, og af Erfarenhed mærket, hvad Virkning en Comoedie giør paa Skue-Pladsen: Og, naar saa er, kand man ikke meget reflectere paa deres Domme, der sidde hiemme og criticere udi deres Skriver-Stuer, uden at have seet et Skuespills Forestilning; thi de samme kand ikke dømme uden om Stilen, om Moralske Sententzer, og et Stykkes Regularitet, da Erfarenhed lærer, at en Comoedie, som efter alle Academiske Regler er indretted, dog ingen Comoedie er. Thi mangt et Skuespill, som ved Læsning synes at være af ingen Betydelse, haver den fortreffeligste Virkning paa Skue-Pladsen. Et Skuespils Vægt og Gyldighed grunder sig derfor ikke paa lærde Journalisters Critiqver, men paa Tilskuernes Applausu: naar jeg siger Tilskuerne, meener jeg alleene saadanne, som have en naturlig og ufordærved Smag.

It is not a good idea to call yourself a sardine in a family like Leo's, who will not let you forget it.

It’s shameful that today’s mouthy political expositors aren’t better versed in Orwell. Can you imagine a theatre director who hasn’t studied Shakespeare?

It is very good, Wisehammer, it's very well written, but it's too-too-political. It will be considered provocative." "You don't want me to say it." "Not tonight. We have many people against us." "I could tone it down. I could omit 'We left our country for our country's good.'" "That's the best line.

I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn't cultist and hero-worshiping. I was hungry. I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn't do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available.

I've never been in love, never in my life. Oh, I've dreamed of love, dreamed endlessly, day and night, but my soul is like a fine piano that's locked, and the key is lost.

It’s no longer history in the making. It’s our story we are making.

MARIE-LOUISE. […] J’ai lu dans le Sélection, l’aut’jour, qu’une famille c’est comme une cellule vivante, que chaque membre de la famille doit contribuer à la vie de la cellule… Cellule mon cul… Ah! Oui, pour être une cellule, c’est une cellule, mais pas de c’te sorte-là! Nous autres, quand on se marie, c’est pour être tu-seuls ensemble. Toé [Léopold], t’es tu-seule, ton mari à côté de toé est tu-seul, pis tes enfants sont tu-seuls de leur bord… Pis tout le monde se regarder comme chien et chat… Une gang de tu-seuls ensemble, c’est ça qu’on est!

Le monde est un théâtre, mais la pièce est mal distribuée.

...mangt et Skuespill fortiener ikke Navn af Skuespill, endskiønt alle Logiske Regler derved ere i Agt tagne.

L'enfance est un couteau planté dans la gorge.

Men jeg drister mig, uden Vanitet, at sige, at vore Nordiske Tilskuere, helst af Middelstand, ere langt beqvem-mere Dommere herudi, end de Parisiske: Thi hvis de første ikke have saa fiin Smag som de sidste, saa have de den dog ikke saa selsom og fordærved.

Men, mine damer og herrer, De må ikke derfor tro at jeg agter definitivt at nedlægge min teaterpen. Nej, den agter jeg ty tilbage til og holde fast til det sidste. Jeg har nemlig endnu diverse galskaber på lager.

Men, naar Comoedier ere moralske og opbyggelige, kand jeg ikke see, med hvad Føye man kand kaste Foragt paa Acteurs, som forestille dem. Comoedianter ere vel udi de Roman-Catholske Lande excommunicerede: men, saasom paa mange saadanne Steder Skiøger offentligen tillades, lærer man intet andet deraf, end at den Canon er giort hen i Taaget, eller forfattet af Hypocriter, hvilke ere de eeneste lastværdige Comoedianter; Thi en Øyenskalk spiller de hæsligste Comoedier. Den Forskiel imellem ham og en anden Acteur er denne, at skiønt begge agere forstilte Personer, saa forstiller den første sig, for at bedrage Verden, og den sidste, for at legge Bedragerie og falske Dyder for Lyset.