Elizabeth Marvel Quotes

Acting on stage is a living organism you can never pin down, and I believe the audience feeds off that, too.

You can't control how an audience responds to something. It's up to them.

When you talk about the exchange of energy between performer and audience and audience and performer, I hope that I'm one of the best.

I love writing plays because they are living, fluid things that are energised by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

I think sport in general affects what people see in movies. I always try to explain to people in Hollywood that we have to make movies more like sport because, in sport, everything can happen and it's so much better than movies in some ways.

Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.

It's great to work in film and TV, and I love it, but there's nothing that can replace that instantaneous storytelling you get in theater.

No matter how good you might be in a movie, you'll never be any better. But in a play, I can be better next Tuesday. That's the thrill of it.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Acting was merely a pastime; I wanted to make films. But theatre, ah - now that was a labour of love. Can there be anything better than performing without retakes and cuts, in front of people you can see, hearing them breathe in the darkness of the hall?

I think it's more interesting to throw people into a story and let them catch up instead of explaining and feeling like you have to slow down for them. I think audiences, for the most part, they don't want to be ahead of you.

The great fun of doing new plays is that people have no idea what's going to happen next. That goes quite soon, as people start talking about it, and the only way you can keep hold of that is genuinely to keep changing it.

Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

Some artists I know, they would rather not see the audience or envision them. But for me, I'd rather see them. I feel like part of the reason I perform is to feel that connection. It's the reason I love it so much.

There are things you do that just come natural, and sometimes those are amazingly in synch, and sometimes they're horribly out of synch, and you're like, 'Ooo! That wasn't very good tonight.' Most of the time, it's just on.

Compared to film or television, theater is more interactive, collaborative.

It's astounding how challenging plays are... The scary part is that you get to encounter humanity in a way you don't in films. The audience amplifies the experience.

I come from theatre, and I feel like I have to go back to it every few years because it's like nourishment for the soul. And, as an actor, it's the place you have most control: no one cuts or edits you, and you get to tell the story each night.

I feed off the audience a lot, their energy.

We will get back to the earlier, instinctive and less inhibited nature of theatre. Today, spectators are passive, but Elizabethan, Greek and Roma; theatre was interactive.

I'm one of those wrestlers that leaves everything to the audience and to the fans. I never plan anything, and you will never see Alberto Patron planning in the back what he is going to do in the match.

In a live performance, it's a collaboration with the audience; you ride the ebb and flow of the crowd's energy. On television, you don't have that.

There's a different kind of experience you have when you experience live entertainment versus the kinds of media we tend to consume most of, when we're watching television or films or reading books. Live entertainment is a whole different beast.