I hate the idea of theatre just being an evening pastime. It should be emotionally and intellectually demanding. I love football. The level of analysis that you listen to on the terraces is astonishing. If people did that in the theatre… but they don’t. They expect to sit back and not participate.
During my theatre days, I was more comfortable doing comedy. It’s such an irony. I have always played a buffoon on stage, and yet I don’t have any comic role to my credit.
My interest in theatre and storytelling began in my mother’s kitchen. It was a meeting place for my mother’s large circle of friends.
One of my beliefs is that there are certain institutions within a community which stand for the spirit and heart of that community, there’s the church, the local football team, the local pub and the theatre.
I think I’m a better actress for having friends and interests outside the theatre. I wouldn’t want to live my life surrounded by other actors all the time.
I think it’s good for an actor to bounce between stuff on camera and stuff in theatre. If I could do half and half every year I would be a very, very happy man.
Fundamentally, whether directing in the theatre or a film, you have to be a good storyteller, regardless of the form. The thing I had to work hardest at was thinking in shots.
I grew up performing in theatre.
I just needed a job. Before being hired as an usher at the CBS Theatre, I didn’t even know there was a show business!
My advice to young actors is probably to do some theatre; definitely do that. I keep running into these actors who have never been on stage, and it’s invaluable for an actor. What you will learn about yourself is huge.
My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.
My mother asks when I will do some theatre, and there is something about getting your 15 minute call. That is what you become an actor for – performing in front of people and getting the love from the audience.
I remember when people actually wore coats and ties to theatre every night. They don’t anymore. It’s very different.
I always thought that it was every performer’s dream. That’s the epitome of being an artist, being able to express song, dance and acting in a live theatre setting and really connecting with an audience on that level.
I grew up in musical theatre and love to perform on stage.
Individual and corporate support is vital to building on London’s leadership in the arts, and I hope others will join me in wanting to build on the National’s role at the heart of modern theatre and sustaining it long into the future.
My husband, Steve Hamilton – an actor/producer and co-Director of the Southampton Playwriting Conference – and I had been working in the theatre in New York for many years.
I am a huge theatre geek.
What interests me about life most is people, and the why of the world. That’s what theatre looks at: it examines life, and gives it a cohesiveness that life doesn’t have.
Neither my MFA from Yale School of Drama nor my BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University make me any different from other actors in film, television, or theatre.
No, my step-daughter just opened a theatre school for children, I have another daughter who works in the record industry and another who is going back to collage and I have two little ones at home.
I went to DePaul University Theatre School in Chicago, Illinois.
In the theatre, if you say ‘Macbeth’, all the actors will start looking very anxious. I’m so well-trained not to say it in the theatre that I can hardly say it in normal life.
I am a theatre actor, but the last ten years I’ve taken parts in movies because it keeps me in money.
I think as a filmmaker my first contribution would just be to make a good movie that people would love to see and leave the theatre charged, with a sense of excitement.
I’ve always been short and stocky. So when I got into repertory theatre after graduation, I found myself doing character roles: because of my deep voice, shape and height, I was playing 40-year-old, 50-year-old roles at the age of 23.
Telly and films has been my thing, not necessarily by choice, and if the right piece of theatre came along, I would jump at it.
You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or a underperforming midwife at your child’s birth. Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?
My mother’s side of the family was in the production side of theatre. My grandfather, Jose Vega, was a general manager for Neil Simon shows on Broadway.
My father was an actor, and we have the most important theatre company in Montreal.
To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.
I was a musical theatre kid, which meant you could always find me singing or dancing in the halls with at least four other people.
A career in the theatre demands so much commitment.
My heroes were all in the theatre.
I started at the Incognito Theatre as an amateur.
My plan was to go to New York and do some theatre, and then I got the script for ‘Psych.’ I was like, ‘Ahh – just as I thought I was out, you pulled me back in!’ I had a great meeting with the show creator and we laid out the parameters to make the show work: what I would do, what he would let me do.
It is brilliant going to the theatre and being forced to sit and listen and think about life. It can be almost a near-religious experience.
I’ve lived on my own since 17, and when I found I wasn’t working all the time, I ended up starting a small theatre company called Red One Theatre.
Feelings are universal, and if an actor’s doing his job, I think he’s making people sit there, and if it’s in a movie or a theatre, going ‘Hmm, yeah, I know that… I know that.’
The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.
Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.
I used to spend a lot of time at football training, but that time was later spent in amateur acting classes and my local youth theatre, in plays at school and after-school clubs. That filled the void.
Every form of theatre has something in common with a visit to the doctor. On the way out, one should always feel better than on the way in.
The acting bug just seemed to stick with me. I loved going to theatre school in college and continued to train in film classes and had been auditioning for T.V. and movie roles since I was in my late teens. My career has been slow and steady, and I kind of like it that way.
Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
Working on a film, you don’t get time to develop rivalries, but the theatre is like a little village, and the differences between me, Lionel and Georgia grew.
I have a very ‘theatre’ face. I have what they call a wide mask. I probably would have been a big film star in the ’20s with the silent films where they used a lot of key lighting, and make-up carved out your face.
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.
The best theatre I’ve done, I’ve done right here in this living room.
Thirty years ago dinner theatre used to be much more of a going concern than it is now.
The theatre is one of those muscles – if you don’t exercise it, it becomes a strange and truly fearful place.
The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.
I’ve always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre, and that’s really where my training is.
I started elocution lessons because I was being teased, and I had a brilliant drama teacher. At the age of 14, I appeared at the National Theatre in ‘The Crucible.’
I’m very driven, and I always have been. So I’d like to release a successful album, continue in musical theatre, and be more involved in business.
When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.
I’d been gearing up to working in theatre since coming out of drama school, but it was an exciting time for TV drama – it was the birth of Channel 4, and Brookside was very cutting-edge at the time.
The good die young but not always. The wicked prevail but not consistently. I am confused by life, and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre.
Part of what I enjoy about the theatre and acting is that sense of history.
The fantasy genre is so in at the moment. Viewers want to escape from their lives and watch something that is so separate from their everyday existence. People have always wanted to escape their lives – that’s why they go to movies and the theatre.
