Peter Brook Quotes

If you pick up an eighteenth-century play, at the top it says 'The Argument,' and then you have a list of characters, and then you have the play. I was just always struck by that - that, of course, good drama is about conflict.

A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.

Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.

When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.

For me, drama is conflict.

What's interesting to me is drama and conflict. Things aren't interesting without conflict and resolution of conflict - or striving towards a resolutions of conflict.

Good drama must be drastic.

I like a drama. And I think that's the basis of good films, or good plays, is to have a nice drama.

Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.

One of my favourite pieces is 'Antony and Cleopatra' - I'd love to be in that. Or an alternative version of 'Romeo & Juliet' where I get to play Mercutio, something like that.

Well, I'm always drawn to the drama first. A story is really only interesting to me, if you can remove all of the genre moments and remove the supernatural element, and it still works. Then, I'm interested.

We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.

Patsy Ferran in Tennessee Williams' 'Summer and Smoke'-I thought that was just one of the most phenomenal performances I've seen from a young woman.

Drama comes from characters changing. If characters stay the same and nothing changes, there's really nothing to look at.

If significant amounts of time go by without suspenseful action - which is often most powerfully motivated by backstory - the story loses momentum, and readers lose interest.

I'm not interested in story lines or trash-talk.

The way I view drama is life with the boring bits taken out.

I like songs that are part of a dramatic texture, and therefore I like the scenes to be active. I wanna follow the story and that means you lean on the actors.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

People want the tragedy. They need things to go wrong, they need the tension. In my characters there’s a core of trust and love that I’m very committed to. These guys would die for each other, and it’s very beautiful. But at the same time, you can’t keep that safety. Things have to go wrong, bad things have to happen.

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.

Drama - what literature does at night.

The story [for the western genre] is everything. Whether it's a book or a screenplay, the story drives everything. And if you just go out and try to make one by putting on boots and jumping on a horse and riding off... If you don't have the material, the characters and the things to overcome and conflicts that give life to drama, you don't have it.