Theatre Quotes

Did I tell you what happened at the play? We were at the back of the theatre, standing there in the dark, when all of a sudden I feel one of 'em tug at my sleeve, whispers, "Trudy look!" I said, "Yeah, goosebumps. You definitely got goosebumps. You like the play that much?" They said it wasn't the play that gave 'em goosebumps, it was the audience!I'd forgot to tell them to watch the play; they'd been watching the audience! Yeah, to see a group of people sitting together in the dark, laughing and crying at the same things...well that just knocked 'em out! They said, "Trudy, the play was soup, the audience, art."So they're taking goosbumps back with 'em into space. Goosebumps! Quite a souvenir. I like to think of them out there in the dark, watching us. Sometimes we'll do something and they'll laugh. Sometimes we'll do something and they'll cry. And maybe, one day we'll do something so magnificent, the whole universe will get goosebumps.

Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down unless you're a king.

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means a complexity of words movements gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

Eugène Ionesco

As an actor he should be an extra in police line-ups.

Robert H. Gurney

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

The whole motivation for any performer is 'Look at me Ma.'

If you give audiences a chance they'll do half your acting for you.

Katharine Hepburn

Show business is like sex. When it's wonderful it's wonderful. But when it isn't very good it's still all right.

Max Wall

All the movies used to be 'colossal'. Now they're all 'frank'. I think I liked 'colossal' better.

Satire is what closes Saturday night.

George S. Kaufman

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can't be much good.

T.S Eliot

By increasing the size of the keyhole today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

We do not go (to the theatre) like our ancestors to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it.

A play visibly represents pure existing.

Thornton Wilder

I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.

I sometimes wish they would swagger more now buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and keep them rogues and vagabonds which is what at heart - bless 'em - they are.

Actor-manager - one to whom the part is greater than the whole.

I know it was wonderful but I don't know how I did it.

Laurence Olivier

Very few people go to the doctor when they have a cold they go to the theatre instead.

W. Boyd Gatewood

The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding the chin in doubt and the chin at bay.

There are five stages to an actor's career: who is Herschel Bernardi? get me Herschel Bernardi get me a Herschel Bernardi type get me a young Herschel Bernardi and who is Herschel Bernardi?

Herschel Bernardi

On stage I make love to twenty-five thousand people then I go home alone.

In Hollywood if you don't have happiness you send out for it.

Rex Reed

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

Arthur Schopenhauer

You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.

William T. Wylie

When actors begin to think it is time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

Stephen Leacock

Opening night is the night before the play is ready to open.

George Jean Nathan

An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

Thornton Wilder

The live entertainment Canadians like most is the intimate review a collection of songs and sketches preferably with a satirical bias.

Acting is happy agony.

With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.

When the audience knows you know better it's satire but when they think you can't do any better it's corn.

The person who wants to make it has to sweat. There are no short cuts. And you've got to have the guts to be hated.

True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.

Joseph Wood Krutch

A fan club is a group of people who tell an actor he is not alone in the way he feels about himself.

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

Many plays certainly mine are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

Thornton Wilder

You need three things in the theatre - the play the actors and the audience and each must give something.

From the point of view of the playwright then the essence of a tragedy or even of a serious play is the spiritual awakening or regeneration of his hero.

Maxwell Anderson

Hamlet is the tragedy of tackling a family problem too soon after college.

A walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

William Shakespeare

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

An actor is a guy who if you ain't talking about him ain't listening.

An agent is a guy who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what he makes.

Bugs Bunny - the perfect employee. Never absent. Never late. Never changes the script. Doesn't have an agent. Never asks for a percent of the profit. Doesn't ask to have his relatives on the payroll.

Anonymous

In music the punctuation is absolutely strict the bars and the rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.

Ralph Richardson

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does straight to our emotions deep into the twilight room of the soul.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

The best audience is intelligent well-educated and a little drunk.

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

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds come home to roost.

When the characters are really alive before their author the latter does nothing but follow them in their action in their words in the situations which they suggest to him.

Luigi Pirandello

Working in the theatre has a lot in common with unemployment.

There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.

Acting is not being emotional but being able to express emotion.

Kate Reid

A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.

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