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.
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He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world. As they reached the Bubbling Well Road he pressed his face to the windshield and gazed at the pavements lined with night-clubs and gambling dens, crowded with bar-girls and gangsters and rich beggars with their bodyguards. Crowds of gamblers pushed their way into the jai alai stadiums, blocking the traffic in the Bubbling Well Road. An armoured police van with two Thompson guns mounted in a steel turret above the driver swung in front of the Packard and cleared the pavement. A party of young Chinese women in sequinned dresses tripped over a child's coffin decked with paper flowers. Arms linked together, they lurched against the radiator grille of the Packard and swayed past Jim's window, slapping the windshield with their small hands and screaming obscenities. Nearby, along the windows of the Sun Sun department store in the Nanking Road, a party of young European jews were fighting in and out of the strolling crowds with a gang of older German boys in the swastika armbands of the Graf Zeppelin Club. Chased by the police sirens, they ran through the entrance of the Cathay Theatre, the world's largest cinema, where a crowd of Chinese shopgirls and typists, beggars and pickpockets spilled in the street to watch people arriving for the evening performance. As they stepped from their limousines the women steered their long skirts through the honour guard of fifty hunchbacks in mediaeval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been two hundred hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theatre from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theatre for exceeded anything shown on its screen.
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I say in my book that a lot of the music our forebears created was written for rich, snotty, snobby people who had enough money to buy theatre tickets. There was a great deal of trivia, a shallow quality to things ... ... You know, that 'I've got rhythm, I've got ...', there's something about it that's not very serious, and at least popular music during our generation began crossing over into an area where it was saying something about the conditions that prevailed.
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I did a little theatre work after that and the following year I got another part in a television series. Then it was almost to the end of the year before I got more work. That was coming to terms with the reality of the vocation I had chosen.
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Hello seeker Now don't feel alone here in the New Age, because there's a seeker born every minute.
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Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys. But to move an audience in such a role, to hear in the applause that unmistakable note which breaks through good theatre manners and comes from the heart, is to feel that you have won through to life itself. Such pleasure does not vanish with the fall of the curtain, but becomes part of one's own life.
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Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see the sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.
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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.
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Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.
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The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.
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In this theatre of man's life, it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers-on.
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For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
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Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire.
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You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film-you give over your life In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.
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It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman.
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The world's a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and nature do with actors fill
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In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and pai...
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I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
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The truth, the absolute truth, is that the chief beauty for the theatre consists in fine bodily proportions.
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Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it.
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Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.
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The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.
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I did loads of student films and fringe theatre. I worked for free a lot.
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Actually, my favourite roles have been in theatre, but on TV, my faves were Slap Maxwell and Larry Sanders.
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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.
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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.
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But I loved the theatre and I was just doing theatre 24/7 and kept dropping courses because I didn't have the time and the chancellor thought that wasn't a good idea after awhile.
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But men must know, that in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.
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A career in the theatre demands so much commitment.
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From there, I tried out for a community theatre play, joined an improv group... it all started opening up.
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