theatrical analysis Quotes

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

All plays are social comment to one extent or another.

When you're at drama school you spend so much time working on amazing texts and analyzing them, digging into them, and figuring out why it happens, why you are being asked to say what you're saying, and what the words mean. But then when you start working, most of the stuff would just fall apart if you subject it to that kind of scrutiny.

The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.

All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.

I think I started out trying to be very objective about the flow of the play.

What's exciting about theatre is observing human behaviour. You're constantly making judgments about body language, the physical, the emotional, the intellectual.

I'm sure there are some good dramaturgs but I've never worked with one.

My mother was a failed actress, but that was our bread and butter - what we loved most to do was to go to the theater and talk about it and dissect it and understand it.

The art of acting presupposes three phases: understanding a part, intuiting a part, and contemplating the essence of a part.

I don't want to be quoted as 'Tom Hiddleston, psychologist says...' But there is a psychological aspect to being an actor. We are particular students of human nature - not every actor is, of course, but that's what fascinates me about being an actor.

As an actor, I'm always critical watching others; it's just the nature of the beast. For me, any performance that doesn't cause my ego to say, 'I can do that' really signifies that it's spectacular.

In the first place, it must be remembered that our point of view in examining the construction of a play will not always coincide with that which we occupy in thinking of its whole dramatic effect.

Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.

I think that some of these plays are lost in this new horror called development, which is a place for dramaturgs to say "let me tell you what your play means," and the life gets sucked out of a play.