Quotes About Theatre Stage

#1. Performing on stage is my first love - it's why I wanted to be an actor in the first place - and 'Arcadia' is the highlight of my career so far. I love the intimacy of a live theatre audience - you can really squeeze every last drop out of each scene.

Tom Riley

#2. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.

Rene Descartes

#3. My biggest ambition when I was younger was to appear on stage at what was then Nimrod, which is the theatre where my father used to take me on Sunday afternoons to see matinees. The most extraordinary things used to occur on that stage.

David Wenham

#4. I used to love stage above all, but that was when I was a single man. As I get older, the time commitment gets harder for theatre.

Seamus Dever

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

Oscar Wilde

#6. People who have never done theatre before, and have only worked in front of a camera, would find it very difficult, I think, to know how to command a stage and work with the logistics of being on stage. They're very different. The theatre is quite tricky, actually.

David Wenham

#7. I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.

Eugene Ionesco

#8. I still feel I belong to the theatre. There is nothing more challenging and exciting for an actor than performing before a live audience. The stage is the real testing ground for an actor.

Anupam Kher

#9. The idea of doing theatre always terrified me because I get terrible stage fright. In the early 1970s I was offered a panto but the thought of going on stage was just too mortifying.

Britt Ekland

#10. Theatre is filled w/ passion, risk and drama (as much behind-the-curtain as on stage), perfect ingredients for documentary storytelling.

Dori Berinstein

#11. Theatre was an art form that I didn't really respect, and because I wanted to shake it up and do different things on stage, I was able to combine all the things I'd learnt through writing on my own.

Martin McDonagh

#12. I really do not see why there is not a splendid field for good work on the music hall stage, and if I did not have my own theatre taking up my time, I should rather like to go into it.

Lady Gregory

#13. Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols ... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

Antonin Artaud

#14. When I was ten, I saw 'Grease' on stage and thought: 'I want to be part of that; it looks like so much fun.' My mum enrolled me in a local theatre group, and it all went from there.

Michelle Ryan

#15. Life is like a theatre, but the question is not whether you are in the audience or on the stage but rather, are you where you want to be?

A.B. Potts

#16. I received the most fantastic welcome to the Broadway Theatre community. I walked on stage to tremendous applause and a long standing ovation, wondering when I was ever going to be able to say my first line!

Elaine Paige

#17. To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.

Henry James

#18. Totus mundus agit histrionem. (All the World's a Stage.)
[Motto of William Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (f. 1599) and its acting company, The King's Men; taken from the first play to be performed on the new stage.]

William Shakespeare

#19. 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

#20. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage.

Richard Flanagan

#21. I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.

Anton Chekhov

#22. You must not think of yourself as looking at the stage from the audience. You must think of it as theatre in the round and look at it from all sides.

Jay Maisel

#23. Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.

Fred Melamed

#24. I grew up in musical theatre and love to perform on stage.

A. J. McLean

#25. I switched to thoughts of the play. It was by far the healthiest item to concentrate on. Rehearsals were only days away; there is something wildly exciting about a company assembling for the first time on stage. There is also something strangely sexy about it. I can't pin it down, there just is.

James Kirkwood Jr.

#26. I was born in a world of opera, theatre, films, poetry, art, and therefore, out of the wire, I made a stage. That's why they call me a high wire artist.

Philippe Petit

#27. I was trained on stage at NYU in New York City; I did a lot of theatre then.

Michaela Conlin

#28. I feel a lot more comfortable on stage in the theatre. It just reminds me of being a kid and doing pantomimes.

Kelly Brook

#29. I always say to my Twitter followers to come to the stage door and meet me. What I love about being in the theatre, rather than filming, is that you meet your audience.

Sheridan Smith

#30. I've never been a really big fan of theatre. I don't know why. It's so much for effort. It's much more difficult for me than stage acting just because of the pressure that's piled on you and you have to learn the entire performance by heart.

Callan McAuliffe

#31. There's something about doing theatre in London - it sinks a little bit deeper into your soul as an actor. It's something about the tradition of theatre, about performing on the West End stage.

Christian Slater

#32. Modelling was not very satisfying for me. I came to London to model, and I fell in love with the theatre. I was eating yoghurt every day so that I had the money to go to the theatre. I saw everything. It's still my dream to be on stage in London.

Caterina Murino

#33. The society girl meets more dangers than the girl on the stage. There is more danger at a tango tea than in the theatre. The actor is less dangerous than the dancing master.

Lillian Russell

#34. There is only one necessary condition for the emergence of a new theatre, that the stage and auditorium should be open to the masses, should be able to contain a people and the actions of a people.

Romain Rolland

#35. Originally what I used to love was being on a stage and reacting to a live audience and maybe my calling is more in theatre.

Emma Watson

#36. The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage.

Andrzej Wajda

#37.
and yet, whenever he started with the questions I froze stiff, as if I'd been pushed onstage in a play where I didn't know the lines.

Donna Tartt

#38. I started out in theatre, and there's no better feeling than the adrenaline of being on stage.

Georgia Groome

#39. I was convinced that acting was for fools. I was on the stage when I was eight with my father, he was playing one of those Greek blind guys that sees things and warns people, whilst I was in a blue skirt. I think there were 5,000 people in the theatre, it was ridiculous.

Rutger Hauer

#40. A man had said that to her once at the stage door. She'd been leaving after a theatre session, buzzing still with the high of performance, and he'd stopped her to say how much he'd enjoyed it. "You've a great talent for observation," he'd said. "Ears, eyes, and heart, all at once.

Kate Morton

#41. Very simply, a platform is the thing you stand on to get heard. It's your stage. But unlike a stage in a theatre, today's platform is not built of wood or concrete or perched on a grassy hill. Today's platform is built of people. Contacts. Connections. Followers.

Michael Hyatt

#42. From a very young age, I wanted to get up on stage whenever I went to the theatre - the actors just seemed to be having so much fun. One of my worries about theatre, in fact, is that the actors are quite often having more fun than the audience.

Olivia Williams

#43. One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty quick.

Moss Hart

#44. Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less.

Clint Eastwood

#45. As in a theatre, the eyes of men, after a well-graced actor leaves the stage, are idly bent on him that enters next.

William Shakespeare

#46. Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.

David Mamet

#47. I never had any classes or went to theatre school like a lot of actors, so all of my training has been on stage with different directors. That was a pretty good school room.

James Denton

#48. I'm into parlor dramas. I'm into theatre. I'm trained for the stage. I trained to do Chekhov and Shakespeare, I was trained for the stage.

Tom Hardy

#49. I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.

Tennessee Williams

#50. During my theatre days, I was more comfortable doing comedy. It's such an irony. I have always played a buffoon on stage, and yet I don't have any comic role to my credit.

Randeep Hooda

#51. I've never chased fame. I came into this business to be a theatre actress. I was nine when I first appeared on stage. But I can't say I would turn my back on fortune. I'm someone who enjoys the benefits of money.

Joan Collins

#52. In my 20s, I was a monk. I was obsessed with theatre, not being famous, not with television. I was 20 years on the stage before I set foot in front of a camera.

Saul Rubinek

#53. The world 's a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and Nature do with actors fill.

Thomas Heywood

#54. Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often.

Uta Hagen

#55. And if Henry Higgins is not the most reprehensible character ever written for the stage, that's only because somewhere, somehow, someone is composing a musical biography of Ronald Reagan

Steve Kluger

#56. These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye...

Angela Carter

#57. I still think of myself as a stage actor. When I do film and television I try to implement what I was taught to do in theatre, to try to stretch into characters that are far from myself.

Tony Shalhoub

#58. 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

#59. I've been seeing a lot of theatre in New York, and I am sort of terribly jealous of everyone on stage but also really appreciating it in a way that you can't when you're in the middle of it.

Carrie Coon

#60. I have no intention of uttering my last words on the stage. Room service and a couple of depraved young women will do me quite nicely for an exit.

Peter O'Toole

#61. 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

#62. Wyndham's is a beautiful old theatre. The sensation on the stage isn't as different as you might think from the Royal Court.

Sophie Thompson

#63. A stage set should not make a pretty picture of its own. The empty stage should look formal and pleasing, but should seem to be waiting for the action to complete it; it should not hold definite significance in itself.

G. Wilson Knight

#64. Whether it was working on theatre sets or stage lighting, I didn't realize most all of the skills I was exposed to were going to come in handy later on when I became a designer.

Douglas Wilson

#65. All the world's a stage.

William Shakespeare

#66. At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

Jim Henson

#67. 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

#68. As a child I was taken to the pantomime or the theatre and I would always, always fall in love with somebody on the stage. And want to have sex with them.

Ewan McGregor

#69. As an actor, variety is the spice of life. I love theatre ... it's what I enjoy the most. But a bit of TV, a bit of film, a bit of stage - what more could you ask for?

Max Irons

#70. Then I left school at 16 and worked in Perth Repertory Theatre, which was quite nearby where I lived. And I worked there for about six or seven months, as part of the stage crew.

Ewan McGregor

#71. When you step from the wings onto the stage you go from total blackness to a blinding hot glare. After a moment you adjust, but there is that moment. like being inside lightning.

Meg Howrey

#72. Whatever I do, it's crucial to me that I give it 100 per cent. It doesn't matter if it's a short film, stage, theatre, TV or blockbuster. It doesn't matter what level of budget or prestige it is.

Ewen Bremner

#73. I love the stage, I love the process of acting in theatre, but unfortunately, it doesn't pay the bills.

Kabir Bedi

#74. AESTHETICS OF AVANT-GARDE THEATRE
Make the stage an actor
Make an actor the stage.

Kenneth Koch

#75. You learn more discipline in the theatre than you do in movies or TV. You're on stage every night and you have to sustain your energy level tor several hours.

Blythe Danner

#76. See, there's only two theaters, man that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that - the Fillmore and The Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.

Jerry Garcia

#77. There are so many huge roles in the theatre: if you've got the option to play Hedda Gabler on stage, why wouldn't you choose that over a three-line part in a Hollywood film as somebody's maid or somebody's wife or somebody's best friend?

Eve Best

#78. Theatre is so much fun because you do theatre and you have a month of working it out on your own, and then a month of rehearsal, so by the time you get to stage I know where I'm failing and I know where I'm succeeding and your boundaries are pretty concrete.

Chris Pine

#79. A video taped stage performance is just - you know, it's never gonna be the same as it is if you're sitting there live in the theatre.

Nathan Lane

#80. Theatre is about the collective imagination ... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV.

Simon McBurney

#81. My advice to young actors is probably to do some theatre; definitely do that. I keep running into these actors who have never been on stage, and it's invaluable for an actor. What you will learn about yourself is huge.

Yul Vazquez

#82. I like going into a school matinee. I like to be behind the stage because there's a spy-hole and what you see is the best moment in all theatre.

Susan Hill

#83. 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

#84. The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.

Samuel Johnson

#85. I find the theatre faintly embarrassing for the actors performing on stage. It seems rather showy-off in an undignified way.

Charles Saatchi

#86. There is a kind of classlessness in the theater. The rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter, the stage manager, the star of the show-all are family.

John Kander

#87. Opera is musical theatre, and the music can teach you so much about the theatre. Very often I use musical terms to think about how I comport myself on stage: I employ 'rubati,' 'ostinati,' 'cadenze.' Finding these parallels is very fascinating for me.

Toni Servillo

#88. In the theatre the stage keeps the audience aware of the fictional nature of the action. The reader poring over a magazine, on the other hand, identifies what he sees in the photographs as real.

Gisele Freund

#89. I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

Peter Brook

#90. I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.

Jim Henson

#91. In the theatre, you are in love with what is on the stage, with the moment. You just don't get that with movies or videos, or TV, where you know that what you are seeing is repeatable.

Robert Dessaix

#92. In comedy, beware the split focus. The audience should focus on the face of the actor. The audience must see the setup. If there is action elsewhere on the stage, the comic line can be lost.

James Carver

#93. I regard the theater 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. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage.

Thornton Wilder