Theatre Quotes

The theatre is supremely fitted to say: Behold! These things are. Yet most dramatists employ it to say: This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.

Thornton Wilder

The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.

Denis Diderot

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.

Bertolt Brecht

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

George Santayana

A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.

Alfred Hitchcock

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everythinggestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darknessrediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

John Berger

In the theatre the audience want to be surprised - but by things that they expect.

Tristan Bernard

There are two impulses in theatre: to be frivolous or to make rules.

Tadashi Suzuki

From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun.

BERTOLT BRECHT

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

Stella Adler

The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd.

Sarah Bernhardt

Theatre is not and should not be a literary form of expression. A theatrical celebration can take place anywhere: out of doors, in a garage, in a stable. The problem with avant-garde theatre today is that it is absolutely intellectual. You have to be cerebrally inclined to understand what is going on.

JEROME SAVARY

Two strongly influential movements--naturalism and absurdism--have polarized western theatre, arguing respectively for a tidy global perspective of human behavior or for an idiosyncratic local vision, in which ultimately no human behavioral patterns can be abstracted. One is left to choose between existence represented as strict linear determinism or as utter randomness.

WILLIAM DEMASTES

Applause begets applause in the theatre, as laughter begets laughter and tears beget tears.

CLAYTON HAMILTON