It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.
--
Essays on the Art of Theater (1954).Bertolt Brecht
» Bertolt Brecht - all quotes »
Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.
Antonin Artaud
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks ... on screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera. The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes. It isn't easy to do in the theater, but it's twice as hard in film.
Arthur Miller
I'm very nervous when I work in a film and very relaxed before a live audience. I like theater because it's more of an actor's medium. You can control your performance. In film you depend on the director to watch out for your ass, but in the theater you can take care of yourself.
Christopher Walken
let the theater keep what belongs to the theater and the juggling heroes: pretentious words, bold gestures, and the applause of an appraising crowd.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
When I was young, I used to queue at the theater early in the morning to see Olivier. His performances were electrifying...I admired their originality and courage...and their terror. There is no acting like it today. He made me want to become part of the theater.
Laurence Olivier
Brecht, Bertolt
Breitbart, Andrew
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