Quotes About Theatre Plays

#1. I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.

Beth Henley

#2. Mankind has invented the mirror in vain, for there's nobody in this world who looks into the mirror and sees himself as he truly is; each person has his own mirror hidden in his own mind and he can't see more than what that mirror in his mind reflects!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#3. TEN [exploding]. Bright! He's a common ignorant slob. He don't even speak good English!
ELEVEN [slowly]. He doesn't even speak good English.

Sherman L. Sergel

#4. I've actually been looking at plays, and I have read a bunch of stuff. I would love to do it. I have thought about theatre on and off over the years, but other things kept getting in the way. Maybe now's the time.

Jerzy Jeszke

#5. It's very lucky to be able to do a job where I get to sit about writing plays all day and going to the theatre. The downside, I suppose, is that you put it out there, and people are invited to like it or loathe it.

Laura Wade

#6. Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing.

Terrence McNally

#7. May God bequeath everyone the gift of listening to the voice of their conscience!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#8. It is very hard to cast a number of plays adequately from the same company of actors without several parts being miscast.

John Gielgud

#9. Places like the National Theatre or Sheffield, these great engines of theatre, make us cutting edge because they can be experimental. They can do plays that nobody else can afford to do in ways nobody else can afford to do.

Toby Stephens

#10. Directing is something I always wanted to do. I started when I was 13 directing scenes in high school and then plays in college with my theatre company.

David Schwimmer

#11. I decided to have a regular childhood and not pursue [acting] until I left school, although I wrote plays, directed plays, and got involved in theatre at school. When I left school I decided that's that I was going to pursue and gave it a crack.

Karl Urban

#12. It's great to do small plays in the theatre and then go off with Blur and play in front of thousands of people.

Phil Daniels

#13. The commercial theatre may still be considered one of New York's primary tourist attractions, but ... there is no longer an audience for serious Broadway plays ... Perhaps we should acknowledge that, having lost its traditional audience, Broadway can never again be a home for new plays.

Robert Brustein

#14. There's a great charm in theatre; I enjoyed doing it for twelve years and did lots of plays. At this chapter of my life, I am a cinema actor, and I would like to continue to be so, and at some point I would return to the theatre.

Boman Irani

#15. I don't like the theatre. I like plays in which the audience is addressed by the actors. I don't like seeing people talking to each other on stage as if there isn't an audience.

Jonathan Meades

#16. I can't sit through plays and musical theatre. I just want to run up onstage and mess up their hair and turn over the furniture.

Billy Bob Thornton

#17. Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.

Alan Ayckbourn

#18. I was very fortunate that a teacher saw that I read a lot and got bored very easily and had a lot of energy, so she said, 'You've got to go to this youth theater.' I joined Manchester Youth Theatre when I was really young, and I just loved putting on and being involved in plays and telling stories.

Justin Chadwick

#19. I came to Mozambique in 1986, when I first became involved with Teatro Avenida - a theatre company that stages plays concerned with political and social issues.

Henning Mankell

#20. Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.

Stella Adler

#21. Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks / Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks / The founder's you; the table is this place / The carvers we; the prologue is the grace / Each act a course, each scene, a different dish.

George Farquhar

#22. The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

Oscar Wilde

#23. I can never say that I will never return to musical theatre. There may be a part in the future that I really want to do. I love plays as well. I am very open to ideas. I hope to do many things in the future.

Sarah Brightman

#24. The trick to loneliness is to spend a lot of time inside one's head.

Pat R

#25. Television has dried up for my generation, so it's plays and films. You get used to being lazy doing films, but classical theatre's going to finish me off.

Michael Gambon

#26. I was five when I did my first show with the Mountain Play Theatre company in Marin County. I started young, and since no one in my family was involved in the industry in any way shape or form, I think everyone thought I'd do a few plays and that would be it. But then I kept doing it.

Claire Coffee

#27. If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.

William Shakespeare

#28. I used to spend a lot of time at football training, but that time was later spent in amateur acting classes and my local youth theatre, in plays at school and after-school clubs. That filled the void.

Sam Claflin

#29. We have a desperate need for producers in the [commercial Broadway] theatre, and it is very hard for them to get money and find investors for new plays.

Arthur Laurents

#30. Don't forget that the boat and the water are in love with each other; you should never let them on their own; lo and behold, they have made an agreement with the wind and gone off on their honeymoon!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#31. Every play should be 90 minutes. There would be so many more theatre-goers if plays were shorter.

Eve Myles

#32. I don't see why people want new plays all the time. What would happen to concerts if people wanted new music all the time?

Clive Barnes

#33. This outfit called Los Angeles Theatre Works does readings of plays.

Jeffrey Jones

#34. Actor training should be broadly humanistic, involving the study not just of dramatic literature and theatre history, but of languages, literature, and history generally, and should be centered on acting in plays rather than just exercises, improvisations, monologues, or even scenes.

Richard Hornby

#35. I was very lucky. I left college, and Richard Eyre was in charge of the National Theatre. I was offered the lead in 'The Seagull' with no experience and went on to do five plays there.

Helen McCrory

#36. I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#37. There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.

Edward Albee

#38. There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead.

Robert Edmond Jones

#39. A lot of my training is in classical theatre; I've done a lot of classical plays in New York and also at the Guthrie and here and there across the country.

Laila Robins

#40. The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays.

Stella Adler

#41. More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.

Craig Brown

#42. It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times.

William Prynne

#43. There wasn't anyone in my family who was involved in the theatre. I saw a few amateur plays when I was growing up, but I can't think of anything that happened or anybody in particular who inspired me; it all came from within.

Garry Hynes

#44. 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.

Patrick Marber

#45. Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always "Stick 'em up!" In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising.

A.S. Neill

#46. The real thing is, you should be seeing these plays in the Theatre. That's what they were written for. That's where the enjoyment is. Studying them is no enjoyment whatsoever.

Tony Randall

#47. I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.

Howard Barker

#48. I loved the theatre-my dad gave me many plays and books to read. The dramatic form just spoke to me.

Danny Burstein

#49. I had a very nice, cozy childhood. I did lots of plays at school and worked with the National Youth Theatre as a teenager.

Lucy Punch