Theatre Quotes

Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.

All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real.

Play well, or play badly, but play truly.

In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

When does a session of The Theatre of the Oppressed end? Never - since the objective is not to close a cycle, to generate a catharsis, or to end a development. On the contrary, its objective is to encourage autonomous activity, to set a process in motion, to stimulate transformative creativity, to change spectators into protagonists. And it is precisely for these reasons that the Theatre of the Oppressed should be the initiator of changes the culmination of which is not the aesthetic phenomenon but real life.

It is not the place of the theatre to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined.

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

Theatre is the art of looking at ourselves.

Don't expect the theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them.

The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!

The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you're doing and trust it because it's out of you.

Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.

I'll tell you this: you cannot escape the impact of emotion, whether it's in a big theater or a tiny one. If you have it, it inflates you — correction, 'inflates' is not a good word. If you have it, it infects you and the audience. If you don't have it — don't bother; just say the lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can't fake emotion. It immediately exposes the fact that you ain't got it.

Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it.

Look to your consciences and remember that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.

An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.

The purpose of theatre is... making an event in which a group of fragments are sudde nly brought together... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life ... The marvel of being one.

The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting.

It is not theatre that is indispensable, but something quite different. To cross the frontiers between you and me.

The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful.

The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!).

Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now.

I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.

The entire universe is a great theatre of mirrors.

The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony--periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.

Theatre is the most perfect artistic form of coercion.

Theatre is a weapon. For that reason it must be fought for.

I hate the word 'production'...it's a ceremony, it's a ritual...you should go out of the theatre stronger and more human than when you went in.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.

Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theatre.

My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I'll be manager. Ill be the crazy old movie guy.

Good theatre draws the energies out of the place where it is and gives it back as joie de vivre.

We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema - some actors don't like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre.

A young Brit girl with no theatre experience decided to take on an iconic American role on Broadway. Maybe I should have thought that through?

I want to burn with the spirit of the times. I want all servants of the stage to recognize their lofty destiny. I am disturbed at my comrades' failure to rise above narrow caste interests which are alien to the interests of society at large. Yes, the theatre can play an enormous part in the transformation of the whole of existence.

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself.

You know obviously a big TV or film break would be lovely, but I find that I’m essentially a theatre trained actor and that’s what I love doing. I love fringe theatres in London, I love theatres like the Royal Court, Soho and the National obviously and if I could work in any of those and be a jobbing actor for a while then I’m very lucky.

Theatre has no national identity. It is something for the world, whether it is Irish, English, or French.

I feel like I've been marinated in Australian theatre.

The good die young but not always. The wicked prevail but not consistently. I am confused by life, and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre.

I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone.

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

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

An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents.