Theatre of the Absurd Quotes

A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.

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.

I'd never done any Beckett before 'Krapp,' and I haven't done any of his other plays since. I've always felt that 'Krapp' is an autobiographical piece.

All theatre is absurd.

I am grateful to theatre for making me what I am today. But it's not like theatre is my first love. I am equally attached to cinema, which is, actually, a child of theatre, since it borrows heavily from it.

I love Tim Minchin, Bill Bailey, and Hans Teeuwen, and I'm trying to synthesise elements of theatre into my show a little bit more.

I have always felt that the rise of what became known as alternative comedy was born out of the loins of the alternative theatre movement.

We grew up on Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett. You're making something about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you're going to look to those guys.

I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.

I don't want my work to be heavy. The challenge is to make it interesting and engaging, keeping in mind the need for method acting. This is what I have learnt from Bharat Muni's 'Natya Shastra' and from the Russian theatre legend Stanislavsky.

My interest in theater really began in the '70s when American realism wasn't really in favor. I really dreaded going into a play that had a toaster that worked. I just didn't want to see that.

I spent a lot of time in college studying theater of the absurd and Beckett and Genet, and then I spent a lot of time after that at 'Gossip Girl' auditions, thinking, 'Wow, I really wasted my money.'

What I loved about wrestling was just being foolish, so I studied clown. I studied clown. I studied the art of clown. I actually did my thesis on clown.

Going on to train with Lecoq in Paris meant I discovered European theatre at a formative moment growing up.

My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

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.

If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.

Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.

'I, Malvolio' is a very, very funny show, a clown show, but there is Beckettian darkness in the character. Some real darkness, some right close to the edge of despair moments.

When I grew up, in the time of 'Look Back in Anger,' the theatre was very exciting, a place where you felt that social comment could lead to social change.

Eugene O'Neil created an American theater, and Tennessee Williams taught it how to sing.

As a kid, I loved 'Godot' because of the poetry and the humor and the strangeness, but then as you get older, it's much more resonant.