Theatre Quotes and Sayings

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

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
– G.K. Chesterton

Theatre is live content, and you can tell if you have worked your audience.
– Om Puri

Chess and theatre often lead to madness.
– Arrabal

Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society.
– Yasmina Reza

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 primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.
– Robert Brustein

The more personal, the more universal.
– Gary Ballinger

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

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
– 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

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

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

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

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

The roles for women in theatre are much better than they are in film.
– Kim Cattrall

The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout.
– Robert Holman

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

Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over.
– Alan Rickman

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 theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.
– Will Rogers

The theatre is traditionally where people go to hear the truth.
– David Mamet

Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now.
– Peter Brook

Theatre is a weapon. For that reason it must be fought for.
– Augusto Boal

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

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.
– Irwin Shaw

The play was a great success, but the audience was a failure.
– Oscar Wilde

It was only in the theatre that I lived.
– Oscar Wilde

The world’s a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and nature do with actors fill.
– John Heywood