Sense Theatre Quotes & Sayings

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

The Theatre of the Absurd ... can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time. The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions. — Martin Esslin

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive. — Don DeLillo

I feel that David took a risk with me. I have a sense that by starting off in the theatre and going off to do films you are seen to sell out in some way. I don't hold truck with that, but you can't stop people from feeling it. — Julia Ormond

As a kid who wasn't into sports, at school I felt almost alienated at times, whereas in the theatre community there was this amazing sense of camaraderie. Early on, we would go to rehearsals with my dad and I was like the mascot for the backstage crew. That was a big part of my childhood, so I dreamed of one day doing a play in London. — Zach Braff

By obtaining a sense of its place in the unfolding drama of life, set in an ecological theatre, so we can understand why it has become one of the leading players. — Simon Conway Morris

Not a single object seems to possess a practical use. The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn, It is exactly the same sort of sensation I get when I enter the Comedie-Francaise or the Palaise- Royal Theatre; ; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it's like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there's no room in the valise. — Henry Miller

A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true. — Eddie Redmayne

I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage. — Thornton Wilder

When someone comes forward and is an individual, such as a Lady Gaga or a Katy Perry, people respond to them because there is that sense of innocence. It's obviously dress up and theatre. — Brad Goreski

There is only one way of surviving all the early heartbreaks in this business. You must have a sense of humor. And I think it also helps if you are a dreamer. I had my dreams all right. And that is something no one can ever take away. They cost nothing, and they can be as real as you like to make them. You own your dreams and they are priceless. I've been a lavatory attendant, a theatre usher, a panhandler, all for real. Now, as an actor, I can be a journalist today and a brain surgeon tomorrow. That's the stuff my dreams are made of. — Al Pacino

Postmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable memory bank. — Patrice Pavis

I feel like the rap metal at the end of the 1990s destroyed rock music for everybody and suddenly everybody felt like they had to apologise for being in rock bands. People suddenly felt bad about wanting to reach massive audiences and the sense of theatre, that we have in our live show, became something to avoid. — Nate Ruess

If I was producing something, it wouldn't make sense to me to cast somebody because of who their father is because that doesn't put anyone in the seats in the theatre. I wouldn't go to a movie because that person's father is so and so. — Bryce Dallas Howard

We know that modern art tends to realise these conditions: in this sense it becomes a veritable theatre of metamorphoses and permutations. A theatre where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a thread (Ariadne has hung herself). The work of art leaves the domain of representation in order to become 'experience', transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible. — Anonymous

The Theatre of the Absurd, in the sense that it is truly the contemporary theatre, facing as it does man's condition as it is, is the Realistic theatre of our time; and that the supposed Realistic theatre - the term used here to mean most of what is done on Broadway - in the sense that it panders to the public need for self-congratulation and reassurance and presents a false picture of ourselves to ourselves is ... really and truly The Theatre of the Absurd. — Edward Albee

With a theatre audience there's always the additional sense of a sustained challenge of which I'm acutely aware and for which you need to have the tools ready - your voice, physicality, brain. — Greta Scacchi

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

With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time. — Simon McBurney

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. — Antonin Artaud

He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures: - - but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm. — Eliza Parsons

It doesn't make sense, it's not logical, it's not a safe profession or a smart profession if you wanna make money or have a living or have a family. So the fact that we keep doing [theatre] means we're getting something from it that is almost childlike in its innocence. — Santino Fontana

There is a sense of purity in theatre which always attracts me. Deep down, I feel I am more of an artist than a commodity, which Bollywood turns you into. I want to strike a balance. — Randeep Hooda

Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it. — 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

I hadn't studied theatre and I hadn't studied actor training or anything, but I did have a sense of movement and composition, and what the final product would be like, but luckily I had friends who were good actors, who would help me get them, who would get themselves to the place where a good director should get them to build characters. — Rob Urbinati

I think my first bout of that was when I was doing me and My Girl, funnily enough. I really didn't change my clothes or answer the phone, but went into the theatre every night and was cheerful and sang the Lambeth Walk. She said: "The only thing I could do was write. I used to crawl from the bedroom to the computer and just sit and write, and then I was alright, because I was not present. "Sense and Sensibility really saved me from going under, I think, in a very nasty way. — Emma Thompson

A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them ... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older. — Oscar Wilde

The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. [ ... ] If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness. — Antonin Artaud

I think as a filmmaker my first contribution would just be to make a good movie that people would love to see and leave the theatre charged, with a sense of excitement. — Michael Moore

I would like to reconcile the church and the circus. I wanted to transform the theatre ... to get my message across that there is only one God - the living man - the person sitting next to you. That is my religion. I believe that there is a sense to life. — Oleg Kulik

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation. — Mark Rylance

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

Any play I do, anything I do in the theatre, it's absolutely essential for me in a sense, to create a family, to put a group of people together who love to share together what they're doing, rather than be individuals. — George Ogilvie

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

I love the rehearsal process in the theatre, and the visceral sense of contact and communication with a live audience. — Judd Nelson

I've always found it not only easy, but enjoyable. It's necessary for us to reach out and I'm speaking for myself here. I certainly have a sense of responsibility to reach out to these people in the theatre who might look to someone like me for some guidance. — Harvey Keitel

The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subject to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees, the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors. — Alexander Hamilton

Art is by nature aristocratic, and naturally selective in its effect on the audience. For even in its 'collective' manifestations, like theatre or cinema, its effect is bound up with the intimate emotions of each person who comes into contact with a work. The more the individual is traumatised and gripped by these emotions, the more significant a place will the work have in his experience.
The aristocratic nature of art, however does not in any way absolve the artist of his responsibility to his public and even, if you like, more broadly, to people in general. On the contrary, because of his special awareness of his time and of the world in which he lives, the artist becomes the voice of those who cannot formulate or express their view of reality. In that sense the artist is indeed vox populi. That is why he is called to serve his own talent, which means serving his people. — Andrei Tarkovsky

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. — Thornton Wilder

Theatre is more exciting in the sense that you can actually see the audience in the eye. You know there are no takes and retakes. You have one chance to do your job ... and you better do it well! — Christine Lahti

The only way that you can keep moving forward, finding other ways of expressing things about this increasingly complicated world that we live in, is by listening and observing not only to life around you but to the other people who are in the room. It's not about a sort of, you know, a sense that you have to be democratic about these things, it's a question of creativity that the process of making theatre is a collaborative process, and it is not in, it is not a question of, you know, I have no interest in paying lip service to it, for me it's absolutely fundamental. — Simon McBurney

In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here. — Simon McBurney

Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business. — Anton Chekhov

The theatre demanded of its members stamina, good digestion, the ability to adjust, and a strong sense of humor. There was no discomfort an actor didn't learn to endure. To survive, we had to be horses and we were. — Helen Hayes

There's such a sense of theatre in getting glammed up; it's like putting on a play or short film. — Felicity Jones

Part of what I enjoy about the theatre and acting is that sense of history. — Liev Schreiber