‘They are really funny and fresh and they absolutely operate in our world today.’ Doing Chekhov, Reece Shearsmith
‘That’s the challenge of it: to try and make those gear-changes.’ ibid. Steve Coogan in The Dangers of Tobacco
The English plays are like their English puddings: nobody has any taste for them but themselves. Voltaire
It is better to have written a damned play, than no play at all – it snatches a man from obscurity. Frederic Reynolds, The Dramatist, 1789
He loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar I ii 202
The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical, pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. William Shakespeare, Hamlet II ii 424
The play, I remember, pleased not the million; ’twas caviar to the general. ibid. II ii 465
Good, my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. ibid. II ii 545
The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. ibid. II ii 579-580, Hamlet
He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze, indeed,
The very faculties of eyes and ears. ibid. II ii 596
I have heard,
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
That have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. ibid. II ii 625
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. ibid. III ii 1
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. ibid. III ii 19
O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. ibid. III ii 32
If this were played upon a stage, now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night III iv 125-126
4The famous rules, which the French call Des Trois Unitez, or, the Tree Unities, which ought to be observed in every regular play; namely, is Time, Place, and Action. John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 1668
A thing well said will be wit in all languages. ibid.
Ah! let not Censure term our fate our choice,
The stage but echoes back the public voice;
The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give,
For we that live to please, must please to live. Samuel Johnson, Prologue at Opening of Drury Lane
For what’s a play without a woman in it? Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, 1592
To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
To raise the genius, and to mend the heart;
To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold,
Live o’er each scene, and be what they behold:
For this the Tragic Muse first trod the stage. Alexander Pope, Prologue to Addison’s Cato
My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on;
Judge not the play before the play is done:
Her plot hath many changes; every day
Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play. Francis Quaries, Emblems, 1635
The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas. George Bernard Shaw
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good. T S Eliot
The last act crowns the play. John Ruskin
When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, ‘We’re all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.’ If you’re not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that. David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife
Parliament issued an order for the utter suppression and abolishing of all stage plays. Roundhead or Cavalier: Which One Are You? BBC 2012
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running. Edward Albee
If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it. Noël Coward, A Talent to Amuse: A Biography of Noël Coward
Plays are the work of the Devil. Born from a cesspool of plague, whoredom, thievery, fornication and heresy. Anonymous 2011 starring Rhys Ifans & Venessa Redgrave & Joely Richardson & David Thewlis & Rafe Spall & Sebastian Armesto & Edward Hogg & Xavier Samuel & Sam Reid & Jamie Campbell et al, director Roland Emmerich, Cecil
The devil candies all sin o’er. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola, BBC 2014
Sometimes the devil doth preach. ibid.
What’s this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste. ibid. bad boy
How tedious is a guilty conscience. ibid. Cardinal
Heads I win. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 1990 starring Gary Oldman & Tim Roth & Richard Dreyfuss & Joanna Roth & Ian Richardson & Joanna Miles & Donald Sumpter & Iain Glen et al, director TomStoppard, opening scene
And I beseech you instantly to visit my too much changed son. ibid. Gertrude
It’s just a matter of asking the right questions and giving away as little as we can. ibid. Guildenstern
‘I’ve got loads of childhood memories, but none of them are really good.’ The Arbor, opening scene two sisters, 2010
‘House was horrible. No carpets. No central heating.’ ibid.
‘She [mum] used to stay up late and write and write and write.’ ibid.
‘Mum were never a touchy-feely person.’ ibid.
‘Andrea Dunbar is 18 years old. When she was 15 she wrote a play set in Bradford.’ ibid. BBC Arena 1980
‘Quite frankly, I’d rather not been born.’ ibid.
‘That’s where I spent my small years – in the pub.’ ibid.
‘And then it just went downhill very fast.’ ibid.
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. The Importance of Being Oscar, BBC 2020
I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. ibid.
He was always aware he was an outsider as an Irishman so there was always an edge. ibid. Jerusha McCormack, author
Oscar’s first foray into playwriting is a play called Vera or The Nihilists, a play about Russian revolutionaries … It’s not terribly good. ibid. historian
The Picture of Dorian Gray: It caused a storm of protest in the press. People picked up on the homosexual subtext, the relationship between Basil the painter and Dorian. ibid.
Lady Windermere’s Fan is the first of the society comedies … A bad rumour has come to her ears that her husband is embarking an affair with a mysterious woman called Mrs Erlynne. ibid.