Theatre Quotes - Page 35

• In television or a movie I bring my own ego and consequently can mess up. In the theatre I learnt very quickly to shut up and listen. Now I am able to get out of my own way.

  Matthew Perry

  Ego, Way, Television

  "Back from the brink: Fame almost destroyed Friends star Matthew Perry. Now, as he makes his West End stage debut, he tells Neil Norman how he beat his addictions". Neil Norman, Evening Standart, May 1, 2003.

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• Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.

  C. L. R. James

  Ballet, Opera, Firsts

  "Beyond a Boundary". Book by C. L. R. James, 1963.

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• I believe in the time when we shall be able to create works of art in the Theatre without the use of the written play, without the use of actors.

  Edward Gordon Craig

  Art, Believe, Play

  Edward Gordon Craig (2008). “On the Art of the Theatre”, p.25, Routledge

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• Personally I don't think there's any real intrinsic difference between comic books, movies, theatre, novels. I know there's sure to be some differences of some sorts. I've worked on novels, films, and video games, and in an adaptation, I guess one of the issues is that I have to be in love with the thing I'm adapting before I do it. So that can cause a problem. You can be too scared of it. You could be too reverential. But at the same time you want to try to capture this thing that you're obsessed by. You're fixated for a reason. What's the reason? You try to get ahold of it.

  Alex Garland

  Real, Book, Thinking

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• Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less. Unfortunately, there's a style of acting going round, especially with the younger actors, where they talk without even moving their lip. Maybe it's because my hearing probably isn't what it was 40 years ago but I'm sitting there going "What did they say"?

  Clint Eastwood

  Moving, Thinking, Years

  Interview with Michael Parkinson, www.theguardian.com. October 6, 2003.

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• I'm not real. I'm theatre.

  Lady Gaga

  Real

  "Lady Gaga Bends Gender, Minds With VMA Monologue". www.mtv.com. August 28, 2011.

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• Actors already striving in the theatre wouldn't dream of putting themselves on these shows; it means that only about 10% of the talent out there is being auditioned for parts.

  Elaine Paige

  Dream, Mean, Actors

  "Portrait of the Artist: Elaine Paige, Actor". Interview with Laura Barnett, www.theguardian.com. May 22, 2007.

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• I think the theatre is as essential to civilization as safe, pure water.

  Vanessa Redgrave

  Thinking, Civilization, Water

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• You know, not every good book needs to be a movie, or a television series, or a video game. There's great work in those mediums, of course, but sometimes a book should remain a book. I still believe nothing tells a story with the richness and complexity of a good novel. When people say they think a book would make a good movie, they say this sometimes because, if it worked, they already saw all the images in the movie theatre that is in their brains. And sometimes that is the way it should stay.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Book, Believe, Thinking

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• I do not like the Broadway theatre because it does not know how to say hello. The tone of voice is false, the mannerisms are false, the sex is false, ideal, the Hollywood world of perfection, the clean image, the well pressed clothes, the well scrubbed anus, odorless, inhuman, of the Hollywood actor, the Broadway star. And the terrible false dirt of Broadway, the lower depths in which the dirt is imitated, inaccurate.

  Julian Beck

  Sex, Stars, Broadway Theatre

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• We are a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theatre folk.We are the original displaced personalities, concentrated gatherings of neurotics, egomaniacs, emotional misfits and precocious children.

  Herman J. Mankiewicz

  Children, Emotional, Personality

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• Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are "deconstructed and post-individual.

  Patrice Pavis

  Character, Avant Garde, Syntax

  Patrice Pavis, Christine Shantz (1998). “Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis”, p.43, University of Toronto Press

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• More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre.

  Patrice Pavis

  Wall, Communication, Flirting

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• Postmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable memory bank.

  Patrice Pavis

  Memories, Heritage, Treats

  Patrice Pavis (2003). “Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture”, p.47, Routledge

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• I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.

  Adam Rapp

  Thinking, Play, People

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• In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.

  Jeremy Begbie

  Lines, Postmodern

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• Stirner's political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. ... Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual's action. ... The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act.

  John Carroll

  Self, Political, Use

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• I love musical theatre and my dream is to do Once On This Island.

  Syesha Mercado

  Dream, Islands, Musical

  "Swan Song for Syesha". Interview with Rebecca Lynne Tan, May 17, 200.

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• The triumphs of the warrior are bounded by the narrow theatre of his own age; but those of a Scott or a Shakspeare will be renewed with greater and greater lustre in ages yet unborn, when the victorious chieftain shall be forgotten, or shall live only in the song of the minstrel and the page of the chronicler.

  William H. Prescott

  Song, Warrior, Age

  WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT (1858). “BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES”, p.239

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• I've lived on my own since I was 13 and not been to school and brought a son up who's now 18 and run theatre companies and bought a butcher's shop, learnt guitar by myself, taught myself to sing and that sort of stuff.

  Stella Vine

  Running, School, Son

  "I Made More Money As A Stripper..." by Andrew Billen, The Times, June 15, 2004.

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• In avant garde drama ... primitivism goes hand in hand with aesthetic experimentation designed to advance the technical progress of the art itself by exploring fundamental questions: What is a theatre? What is a play? What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relation between them all? What conditions serve this best?

  C. D. Innes

  Art, Drama, Hands

  C. D. Innes (1993). “Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992”, p.3, Psychology Press

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• In theatre, presence is the matrix of power; the postmodern theatre of resistance must therefore both expose the collusion of presence with authority and resist such collusion by refusing to establish itself as the charismatic Other.

  Philip Auslander

  Resistance, Authority, Collusion

  Philip Auslander (2002). “From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism”, p.63, Routledge

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• To move from a discussion of the early relationship between theatre and television to an examination of the current situation of live performance is to confront the irony that whereas television initially sought to replicate and, implicitly, to replace live theatre, live performance itself has developed since that time toward the replication of the discourse of mediatization.

  Philip Auslander

  Moving, Live Theatre, Television

  Philip Auslander (2002). “Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture”, p.23, Routledge

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• Improv Everywhere tramples the lines drawn between spectacle and spectator, theatre and real life, public and private, performance and protest, and reclaims the streets for ordinary people.

  Lyn Gardner

  Real, People, Lines

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• The theatre and traveling through my modeling jobs, all of those experiences have helped a lot actually.

  Alexis Bledel

  Jobs, Modeling

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