Act Theatre Quotes & Sayings

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act - that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? — C.S. Lewis

A fool cannot be an actor, though an actor may act a fool's part. — Sophocles

The closer they come to transcending technique and the memorization of lines
the closer to really beginning to act, in short
the more Chinese they begin to seem. Happy now approaches Miss Forsythe to pick her up in the restaurant with a wonderful formality, his back straight, head high, his hand-gestures even more precise and formal, but with a comic undertone that ironically comes closer to conveying the original American idea of the scene than when he was trying to be physically sloppy and "relaxed"
that is, imitating an American. I think that by some unplanned magic we may end up creating something not quite American or Chinese but a pure style springing from the heart of the play itself
the play as a nonnational event, that is, a human circumstance. — Arthur Miller

If every auditorium were razed to the ground, theatre would still survive, because the hunger in each of us to act and be acted to, is genetic. This intense hunger even crosses the threshold of sleep. For we direct, perform and witness performances every night - theatre cannot die before the last dream has been dreamt. — Declan Donnellan

Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act. — James Agate

I think in the old days, everybody used to act really quickly because Hollywood was built by theatre people. — Bill Nighy

I've been told if you're an actress you can't sing, if you're a dancer you can't act, you can't do theatre and be respected if you've done a TV soap, you can't have a No. 1 record. All these different things they've told me I can't do, but I wanted to do them, so I've done them. — Martine McCutcheon

You can act truthfully or you can lie. You can reveal things about yourself or you can hide. Therefore, the audience recognizes something about themselves or they don't
You hope they don't leave the theatre thinking that was nice ... now where's the cab?' — Alan Rickman

Initially I started in theatre as a Shakespearean actress before film and television. I've always been an artistic child growing up and I knew I wanted to act for as long as I can remember. — Lorraine Toussaint

Embarrassment is a partner in the creative act. — Charles Jeffries

The boat heaves and plunges, temporarily weightless awash. Juliet believes it is unsinkable. She also believes that taxis and buses never crash, that every movie that ever makes it to the theatre must be objectively good, and that her own hands clasped in a certain special formation across her waist will act as effectively as a seatbelt in a moment of emergency. — Carrie Snyder

I loved living and breathing theatre so much that I decided I had to find a way to bring my desire to act and my ability to support myself together. I'd run through the possibilities in Washington, so that meant moving to New York. — Karen Allen

Any play that makes an audience think out of the box, that makes connections to life and names our pain and by doing so makes our pain subject to thinking and the process of understanding, is doing something inherently political. By promoting understanding, by putting experience in context, by making connections between the normal and the rational, theatre is an act of anti-terrorism. It stimulates courage and a survival spirit. In that sense of political, there are a lot of serious plays doing their work in the world. — John Lahr

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!). — Augusto Boal

In raising a people from slavery to freedom, you have called them to act on a new theatre; and it is a necessary part of your business, to teach them how to perform their parts. — Joel Barlow

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. — Peter Brook

I would be so curious to wire my brain up and see what's occurring when I act, because a performance is such a heightened state. I've always found that with doing theatre especially. It's so hard to come down. — Luke Kirby

Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong. — Meredith Willson

Collaboration to me is ... my favorite collaboration in the theatre is the collaboration between the actors and the audience because it's just that thing that happens when the only thing left that is left on the human scale is that human beings come to look at other human beings act out stories. — John Benjamin Hickey

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! — Augusto Boal

The last person to teach me how to act was my A-level Theatre Studies teacher at school, which I literally still draw on. Got an A! — Joe Thomas

They [Barnes Theatre Club] were a very good group, and for some reason when I finished the backstage thing, I just decided to that I should try to act. So I auditioned for Guys and Dolls and got a little tiny part as some Cuban dancer or something and then in the next play I got the lead part, and then I got my agent. So I owe everything to that little club. — Robert Pattinson

The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. — Samuel Johnson

When you want to put something into your part that is not in the play, you must ask the author-or some other author-to lead up to the interpolation for you. Never forget that the effect of a line may depend not on its delivery, but on something said earlier in the play, either by somebody else or by yourself, and that if you change it, it may be necessary to change the whole first act as well. — George Bernard Shaw

When I come into the theatre I get a sense of security. I love an audience. I love people, and I act because I like trying to give pleasure to people. — Vivien Leigh

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

Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them. — Antonin Artaud

I was called to audition for a play when I was very young, following which I continued to act as well as write and direct. When I moved to Delhi and joined Hindu College, theatre became a very big part of my life. — Imtiaz Ali

The first act's doubtful, but we say, it is the last commends the play. — Robert Herrick

I think theatre is a democratic act and I think writing a play is not a democratic act. I think we should give writers more leeway and space to write the thing they want to write, and then we should produce the play, multiple times, and let them re-write it. — Sarah Ruhl

When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all. — Stella Adler

The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy. — Isaac Deutscher

Theatre has nothing to do with buildings or other physical constructions. Theatre - or theatricality - is the capacity, this human property which allows man to observe himself in action, in activity. Man can see himself in the act of seeing, in the act of acting, in the act of feeling, the act of thinking. Feel himself feeling, think himself thinking. — Augusto Boal

Life in the theatre isn't necessarily when you get money from performing. It isn't when you sign a contract. It isn't even when you are in a play. It's when you understand it. If you understand it, you'll know why you want to act. — Stella Adler

Why do you act? You act for an audience. In the theatre, you're in their presence. Film stars don't know what it is to have an audience. — Ian McKellen

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action. — Simon McBurney

When people ask me if musical theatre should be taught in music colleges, I reply that there is no need. All anyone needs to study is the second act of La Boheme because it is the most tightly constructed piece of musical theatre that there is. It is practically director-proof: you can't stage it badly because it just works too well. If you can write La Boheme, you can write anything. I would also recommend studying Britten's Peter Grimes. — Andrew Lloyd Webber

I went to school, majored in theatre, and said 'Mom, I have to choose my own destiny. I want to be an actor.' A couple of weeks after I graduated college I called my mother up and said 'Can I borrow $200?' and she said 'Why don't you act like you've got $200.' — Arsenio Hall

Nobody "becomes" a character. You can't act unless you are who you are. — Marlon Brando

Act well your part; there all the honour lies. — Alexander Pope

The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It's a soothing falsity. — David Mamet

I've been extremely lucky in that I've been a very successful model for a long time. So now I'm an actress and a mother. I'm a theatre rat, which I always wanted to be - I've wanted to act since I was 14 - and I never get bored, ever, and I have four beautiful children. I am, in fact, so darn lucky. — Jerry Hall

I'm excited about the idea of an act of theatre triggering a parallel creative act of writing. — Tim Crouch

When I stand on stage, I get nervous, and because unexpected situations can occur, we need even more preparation. I must have confidence on top of that as well. The reason why I chose drama/theatre as my major is to act after learning all the theory first. You only live once, and I can only live as myself. I think I could learn a lot of things if I can live as others through acting. — Seohyun

Theatre's great. It's such an act of faith. It's a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It's a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That's why I love the theatre. — Israel Horovitz

Still, it was impossible to deny: Going all the way to London without taking time out to attend a few horrendous plays was like making a special trip to Hell without ever asking to meet Satan. So this time around, I decided to plunge in headfirst. Never a fan of Noel Coward, I nonetheless reported to the Albery Theatre, forked over a king's ransom for a good seat, and watched Alan Rickman act up a storm in Private Lives. — Joe Queenan

Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks / Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks / The founder's you; the table is this place / The carvers we; the prologue is the grace / Each act a course, each scene, a different dish. — George Farquhar