Home


Pg 91I CAN take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

the deadly theatre
Pg 11 “audiences crave for something in the theatre that they can term ‘better’ than life and for this reason are open to confuse culture, or the trappings of culture, with something they do not know, but sense obscurely could exist – so, tragically, in elevating something bad into a success they are only cheating themselves.”
Pg14 “In a living theatre, we would each day approach the rehearsal putting yesterday’s discoveries to the test, ready to believe that the true play has once again escaped us. But the Deadly Theatre approaches the classics from the viewpoint that somewhere, someone has found out and defined how the play should be done”
Pg 15 (About ancient theatrical art) “…Its force and its quality enabled it to survive way beyond its time, like a monument – but the day came when the gap between it and the life of the society around it became too great.”
Pg16 “In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear tha marks of all the influences that surround it. In one sense, the theatre is relativity”
Pg21 “In a sense there is nothing a spectator can actually do. And yet there is a contradiction here that cannot be ignored, for everything depends on him.”
Pg 24 “…an audience affects actors by the quality of its attention.”
Pg 29 “…not to stand still as an actor – which means not to stand still as a human being, which means work aimed at his artistic growth”
Pg35 “In theory few men are as free as a playwright. He can bring the whole world on to his stage. But in fact he is strangely timid. He looks at the whole world on to his life, and like all of us he only sees a tiny fragment; a fragment, one aspect of which catches his fancy. Unfortunately he rarely searches to relate his detail to any larger structure – it is as though he accepts without question his intuition as complete, his reality as all of reality.”
Pg36 -37 “Naturally, an author can only work with what he has got and cannot leap out of his sensibility. He cannot talk himself into being better or other than he is. He can only write about what he sees and thinks and fells but one thing can amend the instrument at his disposal. The more clearly he recognizes the missing links in his relationships – the more accurately he experiences that he is never deep enough in enough aspects of life, nor deep enough in enough aspects of the theatre, that his necessary seclusion is also his prison – the more then can he begin to find ways of connecting strands of observation and experience whish at present remain unlinked.
Pg 39 “Deadliness always brings us back to repetition: The deadly director uses old formulae, old methods, old jokes, old effects, stock beginnings to scenes, stock ends; and this applies equally to his partners, the designers, and composers, if they do not start each time afresh from the void, the desert and the true question – why clothes at all, why music, what for? A deadly director is a director who brings no challenge to the conditioned reflexes that every department must contain.”
Pg 39 “A stable and harmonious society might need only to look for ways of reflecting and reaffirming its harmony in its theatres. Such theatres could set out to unite cast and audience in a mutual ‘yes’. But a shifting, chaotic world often must choose between a playhouse that offers a spurious ‘yes’ or a provocation so strong that it splinters its audience into fragments of vivid ‘nos’.”

the holy theatre
Pg 42 “… the notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear has a deep hold on our thoughts. We are all aware that most of life escapes out senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes.”
Pg 42 “We may make a personality cult of the conductor, but we are aware that he is not really making the music , it si making him – if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; trough him, it will reach us.”
Pg 42 “The theatre is the last forum where idealism is still an open question: many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life. They will maintain that ‘Hamlet’ or ‘the Three Sisters’ preformed with beauty and with love fires the spirit and gives them a reminder that daily drabness is not necessarily all. When they reproach the contemporary theatre for its kitchen sinks and cruelties, this, honourably, is what they are trying to say”
Pg44 "Was it a hunger for the invisible a hunger fro reality deeper than the fullest form of everyday life – or was it a hunger for the missing things of life, a hunger, in fact, for buffers against reality? The question is a important one, because many people believe that in the very recent past there still was a theatre with certain values, certain skills, certain arts that we perhaps wantonly have destroyed or cast aside.”
Pg 44 “The curtain used to be the great symbol of a whole school of theatre – the red curtain, the footlights, the idea that we were all children again, the nostalgia and the magic were all of a piece.[…] But the day came when the same when the same red curtain no longer hid surprises, when we no longer wanted – or needed – to be children again, when the rough magic yielded to a harsher common-sense; then the curtain was pulled down and the footlights removed.”
Pg 45 “It is the ceremony in all its meanings that should have dictated the shape of the place, as it did when all great mosques and cathedrals and temples were built. Goodwill, sincerity, reverence belief in culture are not quite enough: the outer form can only take on real authority if the ceremony has equal authority[…] Of course, today as at all times, we need to stage true rituals, but for rituals that could make theatre-going an experience that feeds our lives true forms are needed”
Pg 45 “We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony”
Pg 47 “It is only when a ritual comes to our own level that we become qualified to deal in it: the whole of pop music is a series of rituals on a level to which we have access.”
Pg 48 “More than ever, we crave for an experience that is beyond the humdrum. Some look for it in jazz, classical music, in marijuana and in LSD. […] All the forms of sacred art have certainly been destroyed by bourgeois values […] It is foolish to allow a revulsion from bourgeois forms to turn into a revulsion from needs that are common to all men: the need for a true contact with a sacred invisibility through the theatre still exists…”
Pg 51 “I say ‘shown’ because an actor making a gesture is creating both for himself, out of his deepest need, and for the other person, It is hard to understand the true function of spectator, there and not there, ignored and yet needed.”
Pg 52 “...- the outer man whose behaviour is bound by the photographic rules of everyday life, who must sit to sit, stand to stand – and the inner man whose anarchy and poetry is usually expressed only in his words. […] …in a monologue, for instance, a man stays still but his ideas can dance where they will.”
Pg 53 “Artaud maintained that only in the theatre could we liberate ourselves from the recognizable forms in which we live our daily lives.”
Pg 54 “’the theatre of Cruelty’ comes towards a theatre, more violent, less rational, more extreme, less verbal, more dangerous. There is a joy in violent shocks. The only trouble with violent shocks is that they wear off. What follows a shock? I fire a pistol at the spectator – I did so once – and for a second I have a possibility to reach him in a different way. I must relate this possibility to a purpose, otherwise a moment later he is back where he was: inertia is the greatest force we know.”
Pg 58 “A false symbol is soft and vague: a true symbol is hard and clear.[…] a true symbol is specific, it is the only form a certain truth can take. […] We get nowhere if we expect to be told what they mean, yet each one has a relation with us we can’t deny. If we accept this, the symbol opens in us a great and wondering O.”
Pg 59 “‘Auto-penetration’ by the role is related to exposure: the actor does hot hesitate to show himself exactly as he is, for he realizes that the secret of the role demands his opening himself up, disclosing his own secrets.”
Pg 60 “The priest performs the ritual for himself and on behalf of others. Grotowski’s actors offer their performance as a ceremony for those who wish to assist: the actor invokes, lays bare what lies in every man – and what daily life covers up.”
Pg 61 “A director dealing with elements that exist outside of himself can cheat himself into thinking his work more objective than it is. […] But usually the director pattern shows through and it is here that the desired objective experience can turn into the expression of some individual director’s private imagery.”
Pg 64 “In the theatre, the tendency for centuries has been to put the actor at a remote distance, on a platform, framed, decorated ,lit, painted, in high shoes – so as to help to persuade the ignorant that he is holy, that his art is sacred, Was there behind it a fear that something would be exposed if the light were too bright, the meeting too neat? ”

the rough theatre
Pg 65 “Through the ages it has taken many forms, and there is only one factor that they all have in common – a roughness. Salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that’s not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back: theatre I back rooms, upstairs rooms, barns; the one-night stands, the torn sheet pinned up across the hall, the battered screen to conceal the quick changes – that one generic term, theatre, covers all theirs and the sparkling chandeliers too.”
Pg 66 “If we find that dung is a good fertilizer, it is no use being squeamish; if the theatre seems to need a certain crude element, this must be accepted as of its natural soil.”
Pg 66 “The Rough Theatre is close to the people. It usually distinguished by the absence of what is called style. Putting over something in rough conditions is like a revolution, for anything that comes at hand can be turned into a weapon.[…] The popular theatre, freed of unity of style, actually speaks a very sophisticated and stylish language
Pg 68 “But every attempt to revitalize that eater has gone back to the popular source. […] All the time, experimental theatre comes out of the theatre buildings and returns to the room or the ring…”
Pg 70 “The wish to change society, to get it to confront its eternal hypocrisies, is a great powerhouse.”
Pg 71 “For Brecht, a necessary theatre could never for one moment take its sights off the society it was serving. There was no fourth wall between actors and audience – the actor’s unique aim was to crate a precise response in an audience for whom he had total respect.”
Pg 72“Alienation is above all an appeal to the spectator to work for himself, so to become more and more responsible for accepting what he sees only if it is convincing to him in an adult way. Brecht rejects the romantic notion that in the theatre we all become children again.”
Pg 73 “All this stems from a strict sense of purpose. Brecht believed that, in making an audience take stock of the elements in a situation, the theatre was serving the purpose of leading its audience to a juster understanding of the society in which it lived, and so to learning in what ways that society was capable of change.”
Pg 75 – 76 “He pointed out that every actor has to serve the action of the play, but until the actor understand what the true action of the play is, what its true purpose is from the author’s point of view and in relation to the needs of a changing world out side, he cannot possibly know what he is serving”
Pg 77 - 78 “Everything is illusion. The exchange of impressions through images is our basic language: at the moment when one man expresses on image at that same instant the other man meets him in belief. The shared association is the language: if the association evokes nothing in the second person, if there is no instant of share illusion, there is no exchange. […] In all communication, illusions materialize and disappear.”

the immediate theatre
Pg110 “…and the conviction that the sifting, the weeding the selecting, the dividing, the refining and transmuting are activities that never end.”
Pg 112 “He is reaching inside himself for an alphabet that is also fossilized, for the language of signs from life that knows is the language not of invention but of his conditioning. [..] …like Marcel Marceau’s character who breaks out of one prison to find himself within another
Pg126-127 “Now the moment of performance, when it comes, is reached through two passageways – the foyer and the stage door. Are these, in symbolic terms, links or are they to be seen as symbols of separation? If the stage is related to life, if the auditorium is related to life, then the openings must be free and open passageways must allow an easy transition from outside life to meeting place [..] The only thing that all forms of theatre have in common is the need for an audience.2
Pg 130 “We could observe haw an audience is in no way prepared to make its own instant judgements second for second”
Pg 132 "Behind all attempts to reach new audiences there is a secret patronage – ‘you too can come to the party’ – and like all patronage, it conceals a lie. The lie is the implication that the gift is worth receiving. Do we truly believe in its worth?”
Pg 134 “this is how I understand a necessary theatre, one in which there is only a practical difference between actor and audience, not a fundamental one.”
Pg 138-140“.. find three words used every day which reflect the problems and the possibilities of the theatre event. Repetition, representation, assistance” “But we normally speak of a rehearsal: [...] Week after week, day after day, hour after hour, practice makes perfect. It is a drudge, a grind a discipline; it is a dull action that leads to a good result. […] At the same time, repetition is a word with no glamour; it is a concept without warmth.[…] these carbon-copy imitations are lifeless. Repetition denies the living. It is as though in one word we see the essential needs to be prepared and the preparation of ten involves going over the ground again and again. […] What can reconcile this contradiction? Here, the word for performance contains an answer. A representation is when some thing from the past is shown again – something that once was, now is. For representation it is not a imitation or description of a past event, a representation denies time. It abolishes that difference between yesterday and today. It takes yesterday’s action and makes it live again in every one of its aspects – including its immediacy. In other words, a representation is what it claims to be – a making present. We can see how this is the renewal of the life that repletion denies and it applies as much to rehearsal as to performance.[..] we realize that in a vacuum their work would be meaningless. Here we find a clue. It leads us naturally to the idea of an audience; we see that without an audience there is no goal, no sense. Assistance. To assist – the word is simple: it is the key. […] The spectators may just stare at the spectacle, expecting the actor to do all the work and before a passive gaze he may find that all he can offer is a repetition of rehearsals.[…] With this assistance, the assistance of ayes and focus and desires and enjoyment and concentration, repetition turns into representation. Then the word representation no longer separates actor and audience, show and public: it envelops them: what is present for one is present for the other.
Pg 140“But unlike a book, the theatre has one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life this is a myth; we ourselves can never go back on anything.”
Closing “If everyday life, ‘if’ is fiction, in the theatre ‘if’ is an experiment. In everyday life, ‘if’ is an evasion. In the theatre ‘if’ is the truth. When we ate persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theatre and life are one.”