Quotes about theatre

“All life is theatre,” he said. “We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves....” He laughed gently. “Some players would say that is the best kind of theatre there can be.”

 "Absurd" originally means "out of harmony," in a musical context. Hence its dictionary definition: "out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical." In common usage, "absurd" may simply mean "ridiculous," but this is not the sense in which Camus uses the word, and in which it is used when we speak of the Theatre of the Absurd. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco defined his understanding of the term as follows: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose. . . . Cut from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."

For there's a lot of masochism in the acting profession. We're willing to take a lot of punishment, but the minute we hit a little bit of success we are liable to run from it. We're frightened of it and develop all kinds of phobias as a consequence. Outsiders who don't understand think we have a chip on our shoulder, but it's not that at all. We're so used to failure, to being hurt and rebuffed, that we can easily come unhinged by success.

Here's what I advise any young struggling actress today: The important thing is to develop as a woman first, and a performer second. You wouldn't prostitute yourself to get a part, not if you're in the right mind. You won't be happy, whatever you do, unless you're comfortable with your own conscience.

It is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.

She simply has no concept of what’s real and what’s fantasy—did I say? She’s in the theater.

And who’s to say where life ceases and theater begins—

Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have — by disrupting that order — a way of surprising.

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

SAM: Isn’t this a circus...of sorts?

MENDEL: No. It’s theater. There is a difference.

SAM: Really? What is it?

MENDEL: A circus employs only clowns.

SAM: So does the theater.

MENDEL: What shall we play?

BERISH: Can I choose?

MENDEL: Of course; it’s your theater.

MARIA: Long live theater...What’s theater?

BERISH: When you do something without doing it, when you say something without saying it, while thinking that you did say, and you did do something—anything—that’s theater.