Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category |
Quote |
First | Last | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acting |
The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature. [Hamlet] |
William | Shakespeare | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| General |
The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent. |
Robert | Brustein | |
| Acting, Directing, General |
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. |
Oscar | Wilde | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
| Directing, Shakespeare |
The play loses a great deal of its meaning if it is robbed of a magic which springs, not from the glittering tip of a department-store wand, but from the earth, the stones, the very air of the wood; and a magic which is not merely pretty but dark and dangerous. [said of A Midsummer Night's Dream |
Tyrone | Guthrie | |
| Acting |
The performance is not an illusionist copy of reality, its imitation; nor is it a set of conventions, accepted as a kind of deliberate game, playing at a seperate theatrical reality... The actor does not play, does not imitate, or pretend. He is himself. |
Ludwik Flaszen | Flaszen | Grotowski's Laboratory |
