My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I’ll be manager. I’ll be the crazy old movie guy. Quentin Tarantino
I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission. Lady Gaga
My parents were so proud when I got a scholarship to go to theatre school – it was unheard of that a coal-miner’s son should go to drama school. Brian Blessed
The theatre is traditionally where people go to hear the truth. David Mamet
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
It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work – the night watchman. Talullah Bankhead
I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect. Vaclav Havel
I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me. Isadora Duncan
Don’t clap too hard – it’s a very old building. John Osborne, The Entertainer 1957, Archie Rice
A group of public schoolboys and Oxbridge wits rediscovered satire. They were touring the country in what must be Britain’s most famous revue show ever – Beyond the Fringe. The Queen came to see the show at London’s Fortune Theatre where she found a long-faced comic genius called Peter Cook slicing up the prime minister ... Nothing like it had ever happened to a British prime minister before. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, BBC 2007
Since 1987 he has often worked in Florence. Miller has also had an extensive career in theatre and television. Arena: Jonathan Miller, BBC 2012
I became associated with what was then a secret society called The Apostles. ibid.
After running for two years Beyond the Fringe went to New York in 1962. ibid.
The Body in Question was a ground-breaking thirteen-part series about the human body and the history of medicine. ibid.
In 1980 Miller accepted the role of producing the BBC Television Shakespeare. ibid.
In 1982 Miller caused a sensation with his production of Verdi’s Rigoletto at the English National Opera. Miller transposed the traditional 16th century setting to New York’s Little Italy in the 1950s. ibid.
Miller produced Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutti for BBC TV in 1986. ibid.
‘I am absolutely committed to abstract configurations.’ ibid. Miller
Miller presented a major television series on the subject of atheism in 2004. ibid.
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. Kenneth Tynan, English theatre critic
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
The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe. P S Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world. Arthur Miller
The Trojan Women director Michael Cacoyannis … One of the most shocking stories ever written. Michael Scott, Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth I: Democrats, BBC 2013
Love, War, Sacrifice, Fear, and Death … Utterly gripping today. ibid.
Ancient drama changed our world. ibid.
The story of theatre is the story of Athens … One of the greatest shows on Earth. ibid.
Drama was perhaps the biggest innovation of them all. ibid.
Oedipus the King by Sophocles: it tells the story of Oedipus – a man who is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. ibid.
They poked fun at contemporary Athens. ibid.
Today just 32 of them survive in full ... Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides … ibid.
Comedy was irreverent, rude and bawdy. ibid.
Theatre was an institution that plugged into religious, civic, political, military aspects of ancient Athenian society … essential part of Athenian life. ibid.
Drama – that most Athenian of inventions – would thrive, spreading throughout the Greek world and beyond. Michael Scott, Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth II: Kings
Theatre had become a central part of any Greek community. ibid.
Seneca wrote nine tragedies which retold stories from Greek myth. Michael Scott, Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth III: Romans
Garrick improves the lighting ... Drury Lane Theatre is the first to try a new form of lighting ... Argon’s lamp. James Burke, Connections s3e7: A Special Place, BBC 1997
Such was the kind of theatre Sheridan encountered when he arrived in the 1770s: one dominated by actors, hashed-up revivals of Shakespeare, and soggy, genteel, middle-class comedies. Admittedly, fellow-dramatist Oliver Goldsmith did his bit to change all that. In 1773 he published a famous critique, Comparisons Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy. Michael Billington, Sheridan’s Irish Wizardry: The Rivals and The School for Scandal
The same year Goldsmith put his theories about Laughing Comedy into practice with She Stoops to Conquer. ibid.
Sheridan went further: he advanced the notion that comedy should puncture hypocrisy and satirize the manners of the age. ibid.
But the key fact about Sheridan is that he found English comedy tame, tearful and sentimental and that he left it boisterously alive. ibid.
The theatre is all about bitter disappointment and failure and derision, and Mr Jonathan knows all about that. Razzle Dazzle: A Journey into Dance 2007 starring Nick Twiney & Kerry Armstrong & Denise Roberts & Tara Morice & Ben Miller & Jane Hall & Nadine Garner & Toni Lamond & Noeline Brown & Josephine Barwick & Barry Crocker & Damon Gameau & Scott Irwin et al, director Daren Ashton
Theatres are much the same the world over … The End of the Line 1957 starring Alan Baxter & Barbara Shelley & Ferdy Mayne & Jennifer Jayne & Arthur Gomez & Jack Melford & Geoffrey Hibbert & Charles Clay & Stella Bonheur et al, opening line
Shakespeare’s background was commonplace. His father, John, was a glover and wool-dealer in the small Midlands market-town of Stratford-Upon-Avon who had married Mary Arden, daughter of a prosperous farmer, in or about 1557. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, editors Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor
Shakespeare would have left school when he was about fifteen. What he did then is not known. One of the earliest legends about him, recorded by John Aubrey around 1681, is that ‘he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’. ibid.
In fact we know a lot about some of the less exciting aspects of his life, such as his business dealings and his tax debts. ibid.
In 1604 Shakespeare was lodging in north London with a Huguenot family called Mountjoy; in 1612 he was to testify in a court case relating to a marriage settlement on the daughter of the house. The records of the case provide our only transcript of words actually spoken by Shakespeare; they are not characterful. ibid.