Theatre Drama Quotes & Sayings

The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe. — P.S. Baber

At best, the relationship between drama critic and playwright is a pretty twiggy affair. When I'm asked whom I write for, after the obligatory, I write only for myself, I realize that I have an imaginary circle of peers - writers and respected or savvy theatre folk, some dramatic writers and some not, some living, some long gone ... Often a writer is aware as he works that a certain critic is going to hate this one ... You don't let what a critic might say worry you or alter your work; it might even add a spark to the gleeful process of creation. — Lanford Wilson

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

If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven't been paying attention. — Duncan MacMillan

I think a person has to believe in something,
or search out some kind of faith;
otherwise life is empty, nothing.
How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,
why children are born, why there are stars in the sky ...
Either you know why you live,
or it's all small, unnecessary bits. — Sarah Ruhl

The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths. — Peter Ackroyd

I want to do theatre and I want to do period drama. — Lauren Socha

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control. — George Eliot

You'll never really be great unless you aim high. — Stella Adler

When you snatch happiness in little bits, fits and starts, and lose it, like me, you become coarse, little by little, you become hateful. — Sarah Ruhl

I went to drama school in Paris and started doing theatre with a friend. Then I moved into movies and slowly but surely I got roles. — Jean Reno

We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women. — Carl Jung

On Monday last I sat without a murmur in a stuffy theatre on a summer afternoon from three to nearly half-past 6, spellbound by Ibsen; but the price I paid for it was to find myself stricken with mortal impatience and boredom the next time I attempted to sit out the pre-Ibsenite drama for five-minutes. 269 — George Bernard Shaw

In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.
Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me. — Barbara Ehrenreich

What the music offers in a good opera is something that comes from a region that precedes the concrete concept of drama and, strictly speaking, stands outside the world of drama. Opera does not permit men to appear in nakedly logical acts, for the music dissolves feelings and thoughts into melodies and rhythms, harmonies and counterpoints, which in themselves have no conceptual meaning. Thus in opera objective situations may very well become entirely subjective expressions. Because of its paradoxical nature opera is capable of paradoxical effects; it can express purely sensuously the most profound abstractions, and the musical drama, exerting a mass effect far more than does the spoken drama, is much more primitive as drama than the spoken theatre; it must render conflict and character in immediate symbols. — Paul Henry Lang

I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing. — Tony Kushner

Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater. — Graeme Murphy

Let's sing our way out of this — Isabel Fraire

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

Drama - what literature does at night. — George Jean Nathan

Oh, where is it, where did my past go, when I was young, happy and intelligent, when my dreams and thoughts had some grace, and the present and future were lit up with hope? Why is it, that when we've just started to live, we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, useless, with flattened-out souls? — Sarah Ruhl

I've never been in love, never in my life.
Oh, I've dreamed of love, dreamed endlessly, day and night,
but my soul is like a fine piano that's locked,
and the key is lost. — Sarah Ruhl

I'd been gearing up to working in theatre since coming out of drama school, but it was an exciting time for TV drama - it was the birth of Channel 4, and Brookside was very cutting-edge at the time. — Amanda Burton

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political. — Pierre Bourdieu

I tried to get into the National Youth Theatre and didn't, and I tried to get into drama school and didn't, and then I went to university and was really delighted that I went there. I think having the word 'no' can be quite creative. — Tamsin Greig

I would like to curl up and become a small thing. About this big. And still. Very still. Have you ever become so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved's hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence? — Sarah Ruhl

I used to do a Saturday drama group called Young Blood Theatre Company with school-friends in west London - nothing to do with my mum and dad. A casting director came to pick people out for a new BBC children's series called 'MI High.' She picked me, I auditioned, and I got the job. — Bel Powley

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening. — Kenneth Tynan

What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?
Beatrice: Is it possible disdain should die while she hath
such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? — William Shakespeare

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter. — G.K. Chesterton

When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves. — Sarah Ruhl

From there I did a one year theatre acting course in Fife, and then three years of drama school in London. — Ewan McGregor

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I did a drama degree, went to secretarial college, then got a job with a theatre company in Birmingham. It's been a slow burn, which doesn't seem to have gone out. — Tamsin Greig

My parents were so proud when I got a scholarship to go to theatre school - it was unheard of that a coal-miner's son should go to drama school. — Brian Blessed

If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated ... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce. — Eric Bentley

I only went along to youth theatre with a friend when I was young to try to make myself a bit more sociable. But the whole thing was quite sore; it really hurt me trying to get into drama school. It was a world I knew nothing about - it was very middle class; all that usual stuff. But I was young, determined, and I just went for it. — Anne-Marie Duff

It is part," Rollo writes home to the elder Dr. Groast in Lancashire, in elaborate revenge for childhood tales of Jenny Greenteeth waiting out in the fens to drown him, "part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme-notes- it's as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter. The convolutions of language denied us! the great Stage, even darker than Mr Tyrone Guthrie's accustomed murk ... Gilt and mirroring, red velvet, tier on tier of box seats all in shadows too, as somewhere down in that deep proscenium, deeper than geometries we know of, the voices utter secrets we are never told ... — Thomas Pynchon

Even though momentarily I thought about being a doctor, I was always involved in theatre and did a drama degree. I just didn't have the guts to go, 'Yes, I'm going to be an actor,' until I was probably 21. — Elliot Cowan

Theatre is filled w/ passion, risk and drama (as much behind-the-curtain as on stage), perfect ingredients for documentary storytelling. — Dori Berinstein

Great drama, drama that may reach the alchemical level, must have dimension and its relevance will take care of itself. Writing about AIDS rather than the cocktail set, or possibly the fairy kingdom, will not guarantee importance ... The old comment that all periods of time are at an equal distance from eternity says much, and pondering on it will lead to alchemical theatre while relevance becomes old hat. — Robertson Davies

Real life' does not speak for itself. It has to be turned into words, stories, and plots. It is only when these are lifted out of the unstoppable flow that they hold our protracted attention. Where tragedy's concerned, there is no absolute reason why they have to be told in the form of drama, performed in a theatre. This is why Aristotle is right to insist that the poet's business is to make plots (mythoi) not verses. That's what we need from tragedy, he says: good plots. — Adrian Poole

What I'm trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It's my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it's very much alive. — Pete Townshend

No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good. — Stella Adler

When I was at drama school I wanted to do classical theatre. It just so happened that I did a film when I came out and I moved that way. — Andrew Lincoln

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need. — Stella Adler

What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop ... — Sarah Ruhl

Lights are to drama what music is to the lyrics of a song. The greatest part of my success in the theatre I attribute to my feeling for colors, translated into effects of light. — David Belasco

Drama criticism ... is a self-knowing account of the way in which one's consciousness has been modified during an evening at the theatre. — Kenneth Tynan

I came out of drama school thinking I'd do some theatre, maybe some television, and maybe, someday, a film. — Orlando Bloom

You have to understand your best. Your best isn't Barrymore's best or Olivier's best or my best, but your own. Every person has his norm. And in that norm every person is a star. Olivier could stand on his head and still not be you. Only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can reach what you can if you do it. So do it. We need your best, your voice, your body. We don't need for you to imitate anybody, because that would be second best. And second best is no better than your worst. — Stella Adler

At 17 years old, STG took me under its wing and shared its resources and wisdom with me, even allowing me to take part in a show at the Edinburgh Festival. Without STG and the Ramshorn Theatre, I would not have found access to the world of drama that I later made my profession. — Peter Capaldi

You will permit me to say, that a greater drama is now acting on this theatre than has heretofore been brought on the American tage, or any other in the world. We exhibit at present the novel and astonishing spectacle of a whole people deliberating calmly on what form of government will be most conducive to their happiness; and deciding with an unexpected degree of unanimity in favour of a system which they conceive calculated to answer the purpose. — George Washington

I took up drama and did so much extracurricular work, like the National Youth Theatre and Guildhall's Saturday school. Acting is where I felt most comfortable and how I wanted to express myself. — Douglas Booth

I started elocution lessons because I was being teased, and I had a brilliant drama teacher. At the age of 14, I appeared at the National Theatre in 'The Crucible.' — Gina Bellman

I almost failed drama at school. I hated it. It was all about the history of theatre. — Brenton Thwaites

When I was at youth theatre and drama school, I never thought people would mistake me for a stand-up. — Martin Freeman

We are searching for Go. — Doug Bentley

I was a football player at college and dislocated my thumb. I was out for a bit and passed the theatre and saw some lovely drama students walking into an audition for 'Much Ado About Nothing' and thought: 'That's what I'll do when I recover.' I joined that production and was hooked. — Clark Gregg

I love film, but it's funny going to drama school for three years, where you spend most of your time training for theatre, then coming out and just doing films. — Tuppence Middleton

I started off dancing and playing sports, and I joined the drama stuff, the theatre stuff in middle school because my friends were involved, and it was kind of the cool thing to do. — Kara Lindsay

I was doing a show at the National Youth Theatre, playing an old man. Before that I had played fat clowns and I thought, 'If I want to have the career I would like, I am going to have to lose weight.' I was just starting drama school, and found I was moving around a lot. I also started to eat sensibly. The weight just dropped off. — Harry Melling

Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev. — Tom Stoppard

I had decent but not great grades in high school because I was highly motivated in some subjects, like the arts, drama, English, and history, but in math and science I was a screw-up. Wooster saw something in me, and I really flourished there. I got into theatre, took photography and painting classes. — J. C. Chandor

I paid my dues at drama school and worked backstage in every Theatre in London. — Richard O'Brien

In avant garde drama ... primitivism goes hand in hand with aesthetic experimentation designed to advance the technical progress of the art itself by exploring fundamental questions: What is a theatre? What is a play? What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relation between them all? What conditions serve this best? — C. D. Innes

I'm grateful to be working. The most exciting thing for me is that I never get bored - I've done comedy, drama, musical theatre and now Shakespeare. — Sheridan Smith

I studied drama in high school, and when I was 18, I studied at the Actors Studio in New York. Then I moved to London when I got engaged to Bryan Ferry, and I studied at the National Theatre there. — Jerry Hall

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

Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness. — Ruth Padel

But then I got a job selling coffee at the York Theatre, and when I met theatre people, something clicked. I felt comfortable with them; I felt like myself. I decided to go to drama school based just on that feeling. I had never done any acting. — Janet McTeer

I was supposed to go to drama school and then go to New York and do theatre. But I grew up on all those fabulous movies and had read all the bold Hollywood books, and I thought I just had to take a look. — Delta Burke

I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection. — Aaron Sorkin

Professionally, I was at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and did lots of things there, and then I won the BBC Carlton Hobbs Award, so I did some BBC Radio drama work, which is a lovely way to start out because you work with lots of great people, and you're working all the time, so you're learning rather than sitting around and waitressing. — Lydia Leonard

Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed. — Edward Bond

I got amazing training both with Theatre Sports ... back in Edmonton, Alberta - I can't give those people enough credit - and the daytime drama I did. Incredible training, both of them. — Nathan Fillion

In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone. — Juliet Rylance

The world has never before had as much drama as today. Radio, films, television and video inundate us with drama. But while these forms can engage or even enrage the audience, in none of them can the viewer's response alter the artistic event itselfThat is why theatre is signing its own death warrant when it tries to play too safe. On the other hand, that is also the reason why, although its future often seems bleak, theatre will continue to live and to provoke. — Girish Karnad

I was always interested in the arts as a child - drawing, painting, and piano - but acting became a favourite. I was a major theatre geek in high school - if I wasn't in the drama room at lunch rehearsing, I'd be in the art room finishing up some type of project. — Laura Mennell

I've done a lot of costume drama and theatre - the National Theatre and In fact, most of my work at the theatre, at the National Theatre anyway, was period. — Brenda Blethyn

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable. — Stella Adler

I have an Honors Degree in Drama from the University of Alberta, but when it was done I knew a life in modern theatre was not for me. While figuring out what the hell I might do instead of theatre, I spent a couple of days on a horror film doing stunt work. I'd never been behind the camera before, and I loved everything about it. I joined the local film co-op - The Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta - because you could trade skills for experience. These indie filmmakers were making their own stuff their own way, all the time. Instant education. — Karen Walton

The theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane. — Anton Chekhov

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

I never imagined I'd go into acting, but I always loved drama, and when I was 16, I discovered the Library Theatre up the road. So I plucked up courage and asked if I could watch rehearsals. It was like Heaven. — Lesley Nicol

In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding. — John Lahr

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone. — Gore Vidal

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

The first time my mum and dad went to the theatre was at my drama school in third year. — Amanda Hale

I have always been very fond of them (drama critics) ... I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it. — Noel Coward

My very first professional job was with a theatre company in 1965 and the first job they gave me was literally shovelling sh*t. I was an assistant stage manager and they told me to clear out the prop store. I opened it up and no-one had been in there for 25 years and it was inches deep in rat sh*t. So before I could get anywhere I had to clear it up. I thought, 'All these years of training, the best drama school in the world, and this is what I'm doing.' — Martin Shaw

Starting my career in London was no accident because the city and the industry here are all about theatre and drama, and I respond well to that. — Erin O'Connor

When I started drama school, theatre was the main draw. I never had any movie star notions. Not that there were family ties to the theatre, either. — Anne-Marie Duff