“I’ve always been very pragmatic about the theatre. I don’t see the point of avoiding the bedrock reality that you’ve got a few hundred people listening and watching and being critical of what they’re listening to, and watching. They haven’t come to do you any favours. There may be passionate protective Chekhovians who have come for the unmediated, undiluted true word, but I don’t feel like that at all – theatre is a mediated art form, it has a storyteller, or several. The text loses its virginity simply by being staged, it’s no longer the abstract ideal version, it’s an event.”—Tom Stoppard quoted in Jan Dalley, “Arcadia Revisited,” The Financial Times, May 16, 2009
1 comment:
Oh Stoppard, how I adore him. And he takes a view of the theater similar to the Bard (and yes, he is worthy of a Shakesperian comparison, I go so far)
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