Top 55 John Tiffany Quotes

I’m never going to stop making theatre, but I don’t think I’ll make it as much, because I don’t need to. There are other things I want to do with my life. I want to sit by the sea in Yorkshire and eat Eccles cakes and spend time with my family.

It couldn’t interest me less, the idea of putting a living room on stage. I just think, what’s the point of walking into a theater to see a living room? A sofa in a forest? Now you’re talking.

‘Philistines’ was so beautiful, and it bored me to death. I never want to see another production where the rain splashes against a window and actors wander around in drab cardigans saying, ‘I’m so bored.’

When I get really down, I remember that we all share 99.99 per cent of our DNA with Beyonce. And suddenly, the world doesn’t seem too bleak.

I’ll always have a relationship with Scotland.

Austerity has led us to a terrible philosophy where we think we’ve got to cut back on everything that’s ‘frippery’, like the arts.

I did a couple of short films when I was in Scotland.

If you’re going to be hosting any event or a performance or having dinner with people after a performance, it is work, but it’s also social: food and a glass of wine would be involved often.

I suppose the key for me is about opening up experiences and untold stories to audiences.

I suppose what I aspire to do is to make it easy for the audience to connect with a story.

I looked into putting ‘Doctor’ on my license. But the insurance premium is higher, so I don’t think I’ll bother.

I studied theatre at Glasgow University and then was lucky enough to land a scholarship with a theatre group in Edinburgh.

I’ve never understood why anyone would want to join the army, but that’s irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that, as long as we go on voting in governments who are prepared to take troops into an illegal war, that army is a necessity.

I’ve been in Glasgow since I was 18, on and off.

I thought a director was like a pillow who sat under the writer, supporting them and submitting to their vision. It took me a long time to realise that what a writer really wants is a production that matches the play and the writing. It is the only way the play can achieve its full potential.

Sometimes it should be the job of Broadway to introduce stars as well as cast them.

In film, if you’ve got to do a scene in a swimming pool, you do a scene in a swimming pool. If you’ve got to blow up a car, you blow up a car. In theater, you can’t do that, and therefore, you have the opportunity to engage the audience’s imagination in a way that’s rich.

Only when you don’t impose things on it do you get real political theatre.

The only thing I fear is when people say, ‘I should go to the theatre more.’ I say, ‘We should create work that makes you not have a choice.’

I have a personal issue with Shakespeare. When I first encountered him, he made me feel thick. Well, not him, but the productions I saw.

When you tell a story that you know is having an effect on the audience, that, for me, is the transforming thing.

I tend to work quite a lot during the weekends. My weekend can often be about two hours on Sunday.

Sometimes on Broadway, you don’t know who the investors are, and you end up making a million dollars for somebody awful.

I realise that there’s something about fantasy, whether it’s written by the Grimm Brothers or J. K. Rowling or Thorne or J. M. Barrie, that it gets closer to the human experience than realism every could.

The more everything gets digitalised, the more precious the live experience of going to the theatre is.

It blows my mind that you get Shakespeare where the ‘low’ comedy characters have got Northern or Welsh accents.

One of my favorite things to read in the ‘Observer’ is the restaurant review by Jay Rayner. I love reading about these restaurants that I won’t ever have the time to go to.

Pinocchio’s really naughty. He’s all impulse: ‘I want to sleep now. I want to eat that. I want to run off to Pleasure Island.’ It’s commedia dell’arte meets Grimm’s tales.

I want to understand the anger in the world.

I’m not interested in putting naturalism on stage – I want passion.

I’m fascinated to see how ‘Black Watch’ connects with an American audience.

I was pre-med at Glasgow University. I was from a family who were of the mind that if you were clever enough to be a doctor or a lawyer, why wouldn’t you be?

My need is about communicating the whole, and when the whole is there in the text and in what the actors are doing, then it doesn’t need ‘frou-frou,’ as I call it.

I don’t know how films get made, and I think I’ll leave it to other people.

Trump is like an eater of worlds from an ‘Avengers’ movie, but there seem to be different rules for him. What are Twitter doing, for example? He’s constantly breaking their rules, the sort of stuff other people get thrown off for.

I don’t think that just because people will pay a certain amount for a ticket that it’s all right to charge it.

You can only really get to any truth by telling peoples’ stories.

‘Peter Pan’ makes ‘Black Watch’ and ‘The Bacchae’ look like a walk in the park.

No space should be safe from theatre.

There are always discussions about casting stars in lead roles in theater – especially when you’re working with commercial producers – and it’s not something I’m against, not at all. But any casting has to be right for the project.

I love singing, and I used to perform quite a lot, but now, as a director, you just tend to watch other people perform and tell them what to do.

There are some actors who see a show as something to do before going out.

I love mishmash and the chaos of art forms.

One of the things I realised as I learned to manage a rehearsal room is that the best idea always has to win, and it doesn’t matter where the idea comes from.

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.

For me, there is a real line between something being the worst thing in the world and the best thing in the world.

When I sold my flat in Glasgow, I bought a little cottage on the North Yorkshire coast. Whenever we go up from London to stay there, I’m just like, ‘I’m home! I’m home in Bronte-land!’

Some actors just have a quality, a way of combining music and character and story, where everything just falls into place.

I worked on new plays at the Traverse and did my best work in Scotland for years, so I never had ambitions for things like Disney.

‘Once’ constantly surprises me. I think it’s the power of the music and the storytelling that people connect with.

I don’t like the idea of stepping-stones in art forms: that you do your time at a regional theatre, and then you work in London and go to the West End, and then you do films. I’ve never felt like following that trajectory.

I had a lovely time growing up. But I was very aware of the miners’ strike going on, friends’ families collapsing, and people being unemployed.

I’m a sucker for emotionally exploitative cello.

It’s very hard to argue with the politics of ‘Black Watch,’ because it is not an opinion; it is just the true stories of these boys, and any opinions expressed are theirs.

I’ve never felt opera was a party I’ve been invited to, and maybe I’ve got a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it.