THEATRE QUOTES III
quotations about theatre
No, no, no; the theatre is not a house of evil repute, nor are its followers evil doers: the theatre is a temple where the beautiful is always worshipped; it makes a continuous appeal to the higher senses and natural passions. In this temple vice is punished, and virtue rewarded; the great social problems are presented. In this temple instruction is less abstract, and, therefore, more profitable for the crowd. The apostles of this temple are full of faith and courage; they have the souls of missionaries marching always toward the ideal.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Idol of Paris
It is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
The play was a great success, but the audience was a failure.
OSCAR WILDE
attributed, Encore
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
A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.
KENNETH TYNAN
New York Herald Tribune, February 17, 1957
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 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 collective act of Doublethink: We know those people on stage aren't the people they're saying they are ... yet, at the same time, our hearts are breaking for the people they are pretending to be.
DUNCAN MACMILLAN
"A new vision of Big Brother opens in Adelaide", The Advertiser, May 12, 2017
Participation in the creative processes of theatre is the best way to reveal the human being, and through this to understand one's self and one's society.
FRANCES BABBAGE
Augusto Boal
It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed everyone is at a play. We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex.
CARL JUNG
Psychology of the Unconscious
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
I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art, and is content to address itself to coteries, however "high-browed."
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
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
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
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 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
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
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
Applause begets applause in the theatre, as laughter begets laughter and tears beget tears.
CLAYTON HAMILTON
Theory of the Theatre