Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Improv Everywhere tramples the lines drawn between spectacle and spectator, theatre and real life, public and private, performance and protest, and reclaims the streets for ordinary people.
In 1973, 'Sizwe Banzi is Dead' and 'The Island,' which I co-wrote with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona, transferred from The Royal Court Theatre to the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End.
I feel like theatre gives me the grounding, and keeps me alive, basically. Film gives me the thrill, and it's like a one night stand. But I do enjoy being around people who love it so much.
When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.
Acting is the most personal of our crafts. The make-up of a human being - his physical, mental and emotional habits - influence his acting to a much greater extent than commonly recognized.
I was never the class clown or anything like that. When I was growing up and doing theatre in Seattle I was always doing very dramatic work. Now I can't get a dramatic role to save my life!
To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.
In comedy, beware the split focus. The audience should focus on the face of the actor. The audience must see the setup. If there is action elsewhere on the stage, the comic line can be lost.
I think theatre to some extent is always about telling stories, isn't it, and I think what I've learned is that freedom comes when you tell your story; freedom comes when you tell the truth.
'Black Watch' has taken its place in the canon of Scottish theatre, and that's fantastic. It's a very particular kind of theatre. It's about the music, the movement, the whole 'event' of it.
It must have been an extraordinary time. I guess the worrying thing about musical theatre to me, is if you look at the London season this year, mine is actually the only one to have come in.
Despite a large body of work in films, TV, theatre and concerts, I am viewed by many as a Jewish artist. I do not resent the label, except for the fact that I disapprove of labels in general.
To imagine myself in different ways comes from my beginnings in the theatre. People are more accepting when you go 'apparently', 'wildly' afield from who you are or where you were brought up.
I was never the class clown or anything like that. When I was growing up and doing theatre in Seattle I was always doing very dramatic work... Now I can’t get a dramatic role to save my life!
I don't remember what my favourite comedy film is - truthfully! I saw Borat and I thought I was not going to be able to get out of the theatre because I was in so much pain from the laughter.
Soon I worked during twelve years in theater works of the prestigious Theatre National Populaire. It was the best time of my life, the most difficult, the most interesting, the most exciting.
I would like to be going all over the kingdom...and acting everywhere. There's nothing in the world equal to seeing the house rise at you, one sea of delightful faces, one hurrah of applause!
I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.
People always make that mistake when they talk about theatre - the notion of the 'theatrical' meaning something separate from life. If it doesn't relate to life, it doesn't relate to anything.
After a two-year stint at Cheek by Jowl theatre company in London, I put all my energies into breaking into New York's theatre scene. It took me eight years to build enough to play lead roles.
I don't miss working on camera as much as theatre. But I do love film and television because it's so immediate; you walk on to a set and the tables are dusty, and everything's as it should be.
I came up almost completely through the subsidised theatre. I have never been absolutely at the market interface, where I've got to sell my wares or die - I've always been protected from that.
When the sun sets beautifully, other beauties rise. Nature is a theatre; when one great player leaves the scene, another great player immediately enters. The play always continues excellently.
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.
I love the international feeling In New Yokk. Different foods. Different people. There's everything here. Museums, theatre, there's so much to do I feel guilty about not doing too many things.
Variety has always been in my mind: to do something totally different. I've had a parallel career since the beginning. On one track, the TV and film, the other, theatre, but they never crossed.
When I was 16, I played Tallulah in 'Bugsy Malone' at the Queen's Theatre. Me and five others shared a flat together in Blackheath. It was brilliant being 16 and living in London with my mates.
I am extraordinarily lucky, I was born in a family of strong moral values, and in my life I was able to do what I liked best: debuts, great theatres, but above all, inner and deep satisfaction.
There's something about doing theatre in London - it sinks a little bit deeper into your soul as an actor. It's something about the tradition of theatre, about performing on the West End stage.
My first album, 'Englaborn,' was based on music originally written for the theatre. My solo albums, like 'IBM 1401, a User's Manual' and 'Fordlandia,' have also had narratives attached to them.
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
I think American Ballet Theatre is setting that standard now for classical ballet, that you can dream big, and it doesn't matter what you look like, where you come from, what your background is.
The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.
I like going to the cinema or theatre, followed by a meal and cocktails. I'm typically home by midnight; I used to be a raver but not now, unless I'm on the boys' trips to Vegas, Dubai or Miami.
I've played a lot of roles I haven't wanted to play, either because they needed someone in the theatre or because they couldn't do it without me 'cause they don't have anyone else the right age.
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!
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
I don't know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you're losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot.
You wouldn't tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or a underperforming midwife at your child's birth. Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?
Whatever I do, it's crucial to me that I give it 100 per cent. It doesn't matter if it's a short film, stage, theatre, TV or blockbuster. It doesn't matter what level of budget or prestige it is.
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.
There was no real fringe theatre in London until way after the war, so either a play was done secretly with a club licence or it was done openly and had to be assessed along with everything else.
I've been acting since I was 8 - I used to play hockey and there was a kids' theatre down the street from my house and one day I just walked in and signed up for auditions for 'The Wizard Of Oz.'
Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.
You fight for certain roles, and you realise they're being filled by television and film actors, because theatre is constantly fighting for survival and they need names and faces and ticket sales.
Theatre is the principal job of an actor. An actor's job is to tell a story to someone in a room. TV and film can be great and I really love doing it, but it is a different way of telling a story.
I think there's that weird bastardization where musical theatre actors are treated as almost like vaudevillians or circus performers - that we're somehow not good actors because we sing and dance.
My mother Reba Vidyarthi was a Kathak dancer while my father Govind Vidyarthi was a theatre personality. Later on, he worked for Sangeet Natak Akademi and documented many dying art forms of India.
Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.
I'm looking for one of two things and sometimes they dovetail: I'm looking to go into a theatre and see a certain kind of show. And if it's not there, I'd like to do it myself so it would be there.