Theatre is not just a stage, but a mirror of life, reflecting the human experience in all its complexity.
The magic of theatre is not just in the performers, but also in the audience, who bring their own experiences and perspectives to the story.
Theatre is not just about entertainment, it’s about connection, reflection and transformation.
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
– Oscar Wilde
The beauty of theatre is not only in the words and the movement, but also in the silence and stillness it creates.
But theatre is also a public event, a spectacle or a show, attempting to please or amaze the audience by a display of exceptional stage achievements, that is, special performances. In that sense, like sporting events or the circus, theatre serves what I shall call the performance function: it satisfies our natural desire to achieve or witness something extraordinary.
– Jean Alter
Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.
– Martha Graham
Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.
– Victor Hugo
The true power of theatre is not just in the stories it tells, but in the emotions it evokes and the empathy it inspires.
Theatre is a form of art, but also a form of activism, giving voice to the voiceless and amplifying under-represented stories.
In the theater the audience wants to be surprised but by things that they expect.
– Tristan Bernard
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.
– Stella Adler
It was only in the theatre that I lived.
– Oscar Wilde
The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
– Oscar Wilde
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.
– Arthur Miller
Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society.
– Yasmina Reza
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
– Antonin Artaud
The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
– H. L. Mencken
Acting is a sport. On stage you must be ready to move like a tennis player on his toes. Your concentration must be keen, your reflexes sharp; your body and mind are in top gear, the chase is on. Acting is energy. In the theatre people pay to see energy.
– Clive Swift
Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.
– W. R. Inge
The more personal, the more universal.
– Gary Ballinger
The good die young but not always. The wicked prevail but not consistently. I am confused by life, and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre.
– Helen Hayes
Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.
– Eleanor Catton
The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one’s office for a job.
– Tennessee Williams
The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.
– Andy Goldsworthy
Broadway’s mountain. Tough sledding on the way up – a toboggan on the way down.
– Walter Winchell
You need three things in the theatre – the play, the actors and the audience, and each must give something.
– Kenneth Haigh
I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost – it’s there and then it’s gone.
– Maggie Smith
Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now.
– Peter Brook
To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.
– Simon Callow
The world’s a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and nature do with actors fill.
– John Heywood
The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout.
– Robert Holman
It is a hopeless endeavor to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.
– Charles Dickens
In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.
– Irwin Shaw
Theatre is a weapon. For that reason it must be fought for.
– Augusto Boal
Of course we all come to the theatre with baggage. The baggage of our daily lives, the baggage of our problems, the baggage of our tragedies, the baggage of being tired. It doesn’t matter what age you are. But if our hearts get opened and released – well that is what theatre can do, and does sometimes, and everyone is thankful when that happens.
– Vanessa Redgrave
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything – gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness – rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.
– Antonin Artaud
All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That’s what makes theatre live. That’s why it persists.
– Stephen Sondheim
The play was a great success, but the audience was a failure.
– Oscar Wilde
Theatre is a sacred space for actors. You are responsible; you are in the driving-seat.
– Greta Scacchi
I definitely think that theatre is something I’ll keep coming back to in my career for as long as I can. I also think theatre’s something you have to be very fit to do. I am fairly fit, but I don’t think I could do it all the time.
– Daniel Radcliffe
In theatre, you’ve got to make the connect with your audience in the first three minutes. If you haven’t, you know you’ve almost lost them.
– Om Puri
I think the theatre is as essential to civilization as safe, pure water.
– Vanessa Redgrave
The most effective moments in the theatre are those that appeal to basic and commonplace emotions-love of woman, love of home, love of country, love of right, anger, jealousy, revenge, ambition, lust, and treachery.
– Clayton Hamilton
Theatre demands different muscles and different aspects of one’s personality.
– Victor Garber
No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.
– Kenneth Tynan
The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.
– Antonin Artaud
It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work – the night watchman.
– Tallulah Bankhead
The theatre is traditionally where people go to hear the truth.
– David Mamet
Ambushing the audience is what theatre is all about.
– SirTom
In theater, the wellspring of the character comes from the doing of it, like a trial by fire, but in front of an audience.
– Estelle Parsons
If you want to help the American theater, don’t be an actress, be an audience.
– Tallulah Bankhead
The roles for women in theatre are much better than they are in film.
– Kim Cattrall
Theatre is live content, and you can tell if you have worked your audience.
– Om Puri
The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it’s over, it’s perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu.
– Iros Murdoch
I have never regarded any theater as much more than the conclusion to a dinner or the prelude to a supper.
– Max Beerbohm
Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It’s exciting when you hit on a new way.
– Fiona Shaw
I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theatre is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.
– Laurence Olivier
Once you do a piece on the stage, you become that poem or you become that piece. That’s really who you are. I think that’s why some artists have stage names, you know- I don’t have a stage name, it’s pretty much just me.
– Clinton D. Powell
Chess and theatre often lead to madness.
– Arrabal
The theatre is not the place for the musician. When the curtain is up the music interrupts the actor, and when it is down the music interrupts the audience.
– Arthur Sullivan
The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.
– Robert Brustein
The theater is a humble materialist enterprise which seeks to produce riches of the imagination, not the other way around. The theater is an event, not an object. Theatre workers need not blush and conceal their desperate struggle to pay the landlords their rents. Theater without the stink of art.
– Charles Ludlam
Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over.
– Alan Rickman
My only regret in the theater is that I could never sit out front and watch me.
– John Barrymore
It isn’t a shortage of good scripts that ails the theater; it is a shortage of producers who know a good script when they see one.
– George Jean Nathan
Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is criticism.
– Alan Jay Lerner
The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.
– Will Rogers
Good drama must be drastic.
– Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel
Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.
– James agate
Actors already striving in the theatre wouldn’t dream of putting themselves on these shows; it means that only about 10% of the talent out there is being auditioned for parts.
– Elaine Paige
Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
– G.K. Chesterton
A theater requires two good producers: one to produce the play, and the other to produce the cash.
– Evan Esar