Peter Brook Quotes

But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

Anytime you give a man in a wig a microphone, anything can happen.

Movies have takes. But plays are like life - you don't really get takes.

Theater is about surprises and things that you haven't seen before on stage.

All theater is unpredictable. That's the definition of theater.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.

I feel like my home is stage acting.

It's hard to keep a play alive moment-to-moment, you know? But there's another part of it that I really love, which is that you never know.

Performing is just standing up there and doing something. Performance takes on an edge to it. It has a more dramatic context.

As a child, I was always interested in drama and performance.

Spontaneity is such an entertaining facet of show business.

Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement.

I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back?

You never know what's going to happen next onstage.

The musical is the one area of the theater that can give you the biggest buzz of all.

I love the theater. I love being on stage; I love the live audience. I also love dressing up and all of the make-believe.

I like playwriting because it's rooted in a single location with actors standing talking to each other.

Acting is exciting. It is different every time you do it.

So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.

I have so much respect for people in the theater. You can't do 10 or 15 takes. It's all live. It's like life in motion.

I never tell an audience what they can expect. I never have and I never will. I'm an entertainer for 75 years.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

People root for me in such a way that when they come to a show, the experience of not knowing what's about to happen is a great thing.

I think theater is more about living and breathing, versus TV, which can vary.