Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable.
I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
As much as the mystery element is all a lot of fun, when you do go to 'Edwin Drood,' you're going to a theatre to see a show about going to a theatre and what that relationship between actors and audiences has been for years.
I want everyone to feel as much as possible as if they inhabit the same space. They more fluid the relationship between actor and audience, the better.
All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.
Applause is an instinctive, unconscious act expressing the sympathy between actors and audience. Just as our art demands more instinct than intellect in its exercise, so we demand of those who watch us an apppreciation of the simple unconscious kind which finds an outlet in clapping rather than the cold intellectual approval which would self-consciously think applause derogatory. I have yet to meet the actor who was sincere in saying that he disliked applause.
The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.
You cant be a casual observer of something humorous - you have to engage, you have to find it funny for the relationship between actor and audience to work.
or simply:
