Theatre Evolution Quotes

The great countercultural movement that we all know from the mid-1960s was epitomised by popular music. But within a few years another shift happened: the birth of alternative theatre.

I started to respect older actors when I was young and then contemporary actors later on. Then I learned respect for comedy. When I was first doing theatre, I thought of it as just a means to become Sarah Bernhardt or someone like that. But acting with young people has been a great learning experience.

In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.

At the end of the 1960s, I was part of the downtown theatrical movement in New York that was making work in alleyways, garages, gyms, churches, non-traditional spaces. The idea was to get away from the illusion of the conventional theatre. But then I thought, what's wrong with illusion?

'Waiting for Godot,' when it first came out in 1950, was a very different sort of play to the plays that were in the West End at that time in London, because most of those plays were what we call drawing-room comedies.

Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.

Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public. . . . The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise.

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.

We depend on the critics to give us a glimpse of what happened. Bernard Shaw championed Ibsen, who got the most terrible notices for his plays. Kenneth Tynan championed young writers, and as a result, the theatre has changed radically.

I don't think there's a defined contemporary American musical, do you?

There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.

You know, this isn't theatre like it used to be.

You go through a process of refinement and getting rid of the excesses of your early youth in terms of your excitement about what theatre can do.

'Hamilton' is revolutionary in terms of writing.

Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.

The great thing about theatre is that the performance develops over the run - it changes each time.

There's a certain type of theatre that I haven't got any time for at all - established, boring, same-old stuff without any reason or passion. There's quite a lot of it about, and it motivates me to try to do something different, something risky, raw, ugly, and challenging.

It seems like pop singing has sort of influenced musical theatre in so many ways - you could argue good or bad, really - and musical theatre is written for that style so often, which is a completely different style.

At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.

Theatre has so many competitors, it's no longer enough to see and hear a play. You want to be able to touch and smell it, too.

I sincerely believe that for the New York theatre to remain relevant, all our major producing institutions should be presenting new American plays.

First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.

The idea of audiences becoming part of the show is, I think, where theatre is going.