Theatre History Quotes

My parents used to take me to a lot of theatre when I was young.

I had been in 760 performances of 10 different Shakespeare plays by the time I was 17.

I've played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of 'Waiting for Godot.' I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I've had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver.

Both my parents have done considerable work in theatre and I have grown up with that culture, but I still felt that I needed formal training.

Ever since I was little it was programmed into me that London is where great theatre occurs and all the big shows you love start there.

In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.

Acting is a trick word invented in the festival of Dionysus, before Christ, in Greece at a fertility festival. That's where theatre came from: a fertility festival. No women were allowed. All the men played all the parts.

Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?

Being able to act for a living is a blessing. I have a great theater company that's almost 40 years old.

I went to New York University to study experimental theatre in 2006 and was there pretty consistently until 2011.

In 1993, I was working at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.

The Old Vic has always been first and foremost an actors' theatre, a home for great talent and memorable performances.

There's something very fine and lucid and rich in this tradition of the English actor.

Les Mis' was an amazing experience, to be in the original cast of 'Les Miserables,' and 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' God bless it that was fantastic, at the London Palladium the biggest theatre in London the most successful show that has ever been at the London Palladium, that was fantastic.

In college, I started out doing musicals and Shakespeare.

I've played some great ladies. Mame. Agnes Gooch in 'Mame,' when I started out in the '60s... it's a beautiful role.

I want people to be obsessed with Broadway and theatre as much as I am.

I'd seen a play of 'Richard III' in Coventry when I was 15, which sowed the seeds that you could act for a living.

What a thrill it was to play opposite Maurice Evans in this brilliant, dazzling musical, based on the life of two of the greatest personalities in stage history.

I was pretty new to the Broadway world once I began working in it. I hadn't really grown up being too aware of that many shows or that many actors in shows. I was always obsessed with Judy Garland, though.

I collect musical theatre anthologies. I have a whole library of them.

The person whose work introduced me to the craft was Lorraine Hansberry. The person who taught me to love the craft was Tennessee Williams. The person who really taught me the power of the craft was August Wilson, and the person who taught me the political heft of the craft was Arthur Miller.

A lot of my training is in classical theatre; I've done a lot of classical plays in New York and also at the Guthrie and here and there across the country.

I studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which was founded by Laurence Olivier and has alumni like Jeremy Irons and Daniel Day Lewis. It's a very erudite institution; its ethos, really, was always theatre-based.

I didn't understand how you could be an actor if you didn't also study philosophy and study political science, astronomy. And also just go out and live life and have experiences.