Words matter. These are the best David Farr Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The ‘Ramayana’ explores the limits of secular freedom and the limits of religion.
Write first, worry later.
It’s a very bleak play, but there is some final sense of redemption. ‘Coriolanus’ shows mercy, a Christian virtue in an otherwise un-Christian world.
I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light – not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing.
We don’t live in vacuums; we do care about the world, and we do want to believe our country is doing the right thing on our behalf.
I can only be instinctive in my reaction to Shakespeare.
Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely.
The story of Ilium, the ancient city of Troy, has always gripped me.
You can’t cast Hittites as Trojans; I’d love to do it, but sadly, there are none available!
I think Le Carre is a great modernist writer, which is to say, in a godless world, he invokes deep, almost religious ideas of betrayal, trust, faith, and that’s why we love it.
‘Hamlet’ is so modern; ‘Coriolanus’ is utterly alien to our consciousness, and that makes it difficult for us.
‘Game of Thrones’ is fundamentally based on a Machiavellian, almost Jacobean, idea of power and intrigue.
Sometimes we don’t want to be lectured; we prefer to be taken on a journey.
‘Fall Of A City’ aims to convey, in all its emotional richness, the effects of war and the toll taken on city and family by the horrors of siege.
I would say what you have to do as a screenwriter is strip the book back to find the skeleton. When you’ve found the skeleton – that’s what you trust – you reclothe.
Theatre is a bastard form. I’m always proud of that. That’s what makes it taste of life.
Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn’t present it as evil but a collection of banalities.
‘Hamlet’ is a play of many strange parts, with ghosts and players, politicians and clowns.
The world in the ’90s had seemed somewhat stable. There was talk of the end of history, a calm consensus around where we were all going. Consumer capitalism with some sort of social conscience. Then 9/11 happened, and that illusion was blown out of the water.
In the ’90s, everyone thought we’d solved everything and liberal capitalism was the agreed way to live. That got blown up in 9/11, and capitalism proved completely flawed in 2008.
To try to convey literally what the Garden of Eden was like is meaningless. What matters is its symbolic function.
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.
I was very struck by the fact that Robin Hood became increasingly taken over by the middle and upper classes. He starts out a bandit but becomes a fully fledged aristocrat.
Most Robin Hood stories are not very exciting. There are not a lot of surprises.
The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.