Theatre Innovation Quotes

Places like the National Theatre or Sheffield, these great engines of theatre, make us cutting edge because they can be experimental. They can do plays that nobody else can afford to do in ways nobody else can afford to do.

I never studied theatre; I learned it by doing it. If I had studied theatre, I would not be making the kind of theatre I am making.

It must have been an extraordinary time. I guess the worrying thing about musical theatre to me, is if you look at the London season this year, mine is actually the only one to have come in.

'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.

'Story of My Life' was essentially a two-man musical play. In hindsight, I don't know if there was room for a two-man musical on Broadway.

I hate rules. I hate 'This is the way things are done'. I hate a lack of reinvention. I hate theatre as an archeological exercise. Theatre needs to be urgent.

If you want to get into the shoes of someone, it's not just about seeing and hearing. It is also about what you touch and what you smell. Smell is so specific and so powerful. And this is the beauty of immersive theatre - it's something you cannot get in any other art form. I think this is the real future for theatre.

I'm trying to bring a new generation into the musical theater and to create a new audience.

It meant the world to see kids excited about theatre. That's the great thing about 'Hamilton' for me is to see young people who wouldn't normally think theatre is cool being really excited about how it works and getting involved.

I don't think theatre has changed; it's society that has changed.

Great architects like Taut, Mendelsohn, and Gropius built some astonishing buildings which were to change the way architects around the world thought. Brecht and Weill forever changed musical theatre; Kaethe Kollwitz and others changed German perceptions of the purposes of art.

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.

Artistic ambition is important. And it seems it would be a great time to do some theatre, like a new extreme.

My plays aren't stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental.

I think with 'Hamilton,' Lin-Manuel has really blown up the whole casting idea. It's miraculous. You look at '1776,' it's a bunch of old white guys and old white chicks. You look at 'Hamilton,' and it's just the faces of America.

In 'Hamilton,' we're telling the stories of old, dead white men, but we're using actors of color, and that makes the story more immediate and more accessible to a contemporary audience.

I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.

I just love the idea of taking an elevator down to the stage, like Elvis did.

Seeing the work of directors like Romeo Castellucci, Ivo van Hove, Thomas Ostermeier, and Simon McBurney and Theatre de Complicite, was, and continues to be, hugely important to me. To my mind, these are artists who are forging new languages of performance and storytelling, and their constant reinvention is very inspiring.

I'm more rooted in new plays and new writing.

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

Have you seen the Broadway version of 'The Lion King?' Go and see it. That's where the future of musical is.

We turned Cambridge theatre upside down, using odd spaces and devising everything collaboratively. It eventually blew apart, but I'm still proud of some of what we achieved. The style was very disciplined, and we had the sense to keep things short.

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.

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.