Roger Allam Quotes

I think energy is the most important thing that we can give to people as performers. Anything else is a little bit pretentious. But energy is not.

I would love to do more on the stage; having actual contact with the audience is great. You can give them a good seeing to!

Norbert Leo Butz is a master class in energy.

When we get on stage, naturally, you just get out there and work it as hard as you humanly possibly can do it.

Thrashing about on stage is my exercise for the day!

The reason that you dance and sing is to make the audience feel like they're dancing and singing. As long as you're having fun with it and giving it 100 percent, they're gonna feel that.

Coming from a background of being onstage, you're onstage for two and a half hours and you're in it for the whole time no matter what you're doing. Even if you don't have a line, you have to stay in it.

Being onstage is like being rock star. Whereas if you're doing a movie, it's such a confined space. You know, you do a comedy, it's so hard, too, 'cause with a comedy, there's no vocal reaction, there's no energy that you get back that spurs you on to be funnier because everyone has to be quiet.

Every crowd is different. But that's something that I enjoy, and you can feel it in the first few seconds when you walk out on stage. You know, how a crowd is.

I like to feel that something's alive in acting, like something's really going on.

For a performer, passion is far more important than technical skills. If a dancer's leg isn't at a perfect angle, I can see past that, but if someone's dead in the face, it's really boring.

In live stage, the actor lives.

I've been stealing scenes all my life.

I first came across Langhorne Slim when I saw him play live, and he's an incredibly infectious performer. The way he works the crowd is mind-blowing. You can listen to his music without really listening to his lyrics, but it pays off if you do.

Sometimes you go to a show, and you see someone and think they're not there right now. They're performing, but it's muscle memory. There is no memorising some of the ways we put on a show.

Audiences are not interested in watching singers who stand stiffly and sing for three hours.

When you're on stage and you got a great audience, that makes the show that much better for the band.

There's not much to say about acting but this. Never settle back on your heels. Never relax. If you relax, the audience relaxes. And always mean everything you say.

The youngsters coming up now just go through the motions necessary to make the play. They should bounce around a little, show some life and zip. It adds a little action and gives the fans something to look at rather than the monotonous routine, no matter how perfectly the play is made.

I studied acting and there's certainly an element of performance. I think that the songs are in many ways written to be performed. I think about what it's going to be like to sing them on stage rather than what it's going to be like to have someone at home listening to them on a CD. I guess in that way there's a connection between my acting experience and the songwriting and the way the songs are written.

One thing you have to have when you act is energy.

There's the added element of adrenaline if you're performing. You're aware of spatial relationships and the music.

Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be.

My acting is atrocious, to say the least. But I've found that it's not acting that people are concerned about, it's your presence.

For me, I want to get across the stage to the people. I want to point at you, thirty, forty rows back, and you know I'm pointing at you, and we're having a laugh and getting it together.