Show

“ “At first, this Earth, a stage so gloomed with woe You almost sicken at the shifting of the scenes. And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show In some fifth act what this Wild Drama means.” ”

“ You set yourself to have a lot of fun seeing the main show, and then somebody drags you off to a side performance and before you realize it, your time for reading’s up and all you’ve gotten is a lot of advance information as to what you’re going to find out if you finish the book. ”

“ VI It was the theatre, perhaps, as the theatre was meant to be. A place in which one saw one’s dreams come true. A place in which one could live a vicarious life of splendour and achievement; winning in love, foiling the evildoer; a place in which one could weep unashamed, laugh aloud, give way to emotions long pent-up. When the show was over, and they had clambered up the steep bank, and the music of the band had ceased, and there was left only the dying glow of the kerosene flares, you saw them stumble a little and blink, dazedly, like one rudely awakened to reality from a lovely dream. ”

“ It is merely to show you that one is born to life in many forms, in many shapes, as tree, or as stone, as water, as butterfly, or as woman. So one may also be born a character in a play. ”

“ The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie ”

“ It is not always them that has the most that makes the most show. ”

“ Of scarf and leaf and laughter—ay, it was
The scene for her; she sat, self-mimicking,
The center of her central-whirling world,
And tuned her mood to mockery, and skirled
A showman's lilting flourish on the string. ”

“ As in a theatre, after the overture is played, the first thing shown to the audience is the scene in which the action of the drama commences, so let our first words be devoted to the locality in which the story opens. ”

“ The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.’
‘What a good idea! ”

“ Of human life’:— for I feel as I read that if the stage shows us the masks of men and the pageant of the world, books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. ”

“ From the beginning of June till far into September all the canals of Venice are populated by the amphibious boys, who clamor about in the brine, or poise themselves for a leap from the tops of bridges, or show their fine, statuesque figures, bronzed by the ardent sun, against the façades of empty palaces, where they hover among the marble sculptures, and meditate a headlong plunge. It is only the Venetian ladies, in fact, who do not share this healthful amusement. ”

“ The play is done; the curtain drops, Slow falling, to the prompter's bell: A moment yet the actor stops, And looks around, to say farewell. It is an irksome word and task; And when he's laughed and said his say, He shows, as he removes the mask, A face that's anything but gay. ”

“ Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both present and past. ”

“ The play begins; with the deepest earnestness the audience listen, and, crowded as they are, preserve the utmost quiet. The glorious drama scene by scene unfolds itself, and passage by passage we recognise the beauties of our great poet. ”

“ Both actors and audience, contemplated from the pit of a theatre, look better than when seen in the boxes and behind the scenes. I like to contemplate society in this way occasionally, and to dress it up by the help of fancy, to my own taste. When I get in the midst of it, it is too apt to lose its charm, and then there is the trouble and ennui of being obliged to take an active part in the farce; but to be a mere spectator is amusing. ”

“ He that beholds with understanding eyes can see beneath the thin veil of the commonplace, the romance, the tragedy and the broad comedy that is being played upon the world’s stage by the actors great and little who tread the boards of the Theater of the Universe. ”

“ And concluding, which is clear, The growing drama has outgrown such toys Of simulated stature, face, and speech, It also, peradventure, may outgrow The simulation of the painted scene, Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume; And take for a worthier stage the soul itself, Its shifting fancies and celestial lights, With all its grand orchestral silences To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds. ”

“ Visions of love-awaking females flit before his drooping eye-lids, showing him such sights as might have once been seen in some cytherean temple.
All the girls whom he evokes are young and of entrancing beauty, but, unlike himself,—for love delights in contraries—most of them are slender, frail, as fair as moon-breams, as pliable as willow-boughs, as lithe as Elfland fairies, with complexions like the snows of Mount Rosa when flushed by the first faint rays of the dawning sun. ”

“ In the cold black and white of print and paper, without the accessories of the stage or the personality of actors to help illusion or enforce the story told, the real strength of the drama is most impressive. ”

“ Taken all in all, the sounding profession, the bustling search, and the studied concealment, make a drama, half comedy and half tragedy, the like of which this generation has not seen till now, but the like of which it and its successors may see many times, if the audience does not hiss the play, and remit the actors to the streets. ”

“ Theatre lets us stand apart from the flow of life: to feel pity and understanding and empathy; to smile at human foibles and to weep at human tragedies. Theatre is an art form for all seasons and all moods. ”

“ Every Movement of the Theatre, by a skillful Poet, is communicated, as it were by Magic, to the Spectators, who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are enflam'd with all the Variety of Passions, which actuate the several Personages of the Drama. ”

“ But this is the setting of my drama—the scenery of the play, not the play itself. It is its human contacts that give life its vivacity and intensity. And it is the ear and tongue that are the channels of the cheerful interplay of mind with mind. ”

“ But in the scale of emotion and excitement the theatre comes next to fighting, whether you be the author of the play or opera to be given for the first time before the greatest and most critical audience in the world, or the actor, or actress, or singer, who has not yet been heard or seen and of whom wonders are expected on the great night. ”

“ The French, indeed, tho’ a Nation of great Levity, can attentively listen to long declamatory Speeches, when an English Audience wou’d fall asleep; who love Action and Bus’ness, love Plot and Design; Variety of Incidents is their Delight, but yet that Plot must be founded on Reason and Probability, and conduce to the Main Action of the Drama. ”

“ A drama simple and vigorous, played throughout the countryside, where the energy of talent, the creative power which lies in the heart, and the youthful imagination of an entirely new people will do away with mere physical means, sumptuous stage-settings, and costumes, without which the feeble dramatists of this outworn age cannot move. ”

“ I have acquired the habit of late of patronizing the theatre that advertises a picture-play derived from some novel, old or new, and recounts, by means of the silent drama, a story worthy of repetition. ”

“ And I puffed at my cigarette and marvelled; marvelled mostly at the seeming indifference of Life, of the larger drama, to all smaller drama, to the drama of the individual, play within a play—the individual, participant in both, super on the one stage, starring it on the other. ”

“ Let us try, then, to set before our eyes this public, this audience, and this stage—all connected with one another, as in every natural and living work; and if ever there was a living and natural work, it is here. ”

“ Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. ”

“ The telling of a story either on the stage or on the screen is a justifiable venture, as a very wise and rather jaded public knows, only if that story possesses certain elements that make it as a tale worth while. ”

“ This is the normal form of novel dialogue. The variations occur in the relative amount of this description or comment—of this stage-direction, as I have called it. And I call it that because this comment or description takes the place of what they call ‘business’ on the stage. The actor’s task is divided between his words and his ‘business’, and the playwright is entitled to rely on the ‘business’ to help out the words, just as the novelist describes or comments on the actions and gestures of his speakers, in order to assist and elucidate the meaning of the actual words they use. ”

“ Her speciality in fiction lies in her favourite art of analysing and putting before us, with extreme clearness, the subtlest ramifications, the most delicate intricacies of feeling and thought. A stage audience has its eyes and ears too busy to give its full attention to the finer complications of sentiment and motive ”

“ The aim of the dramatist employing it is obviously to create such an illusion of actual life passing on the stage as to compel the spectator to pass through an experience of his own, to think, and talk, and move with the people he sees thinking, talking, and moving in front of him. ”

“ The printed drama is like a bubbling and sunlit spring, encountered only by wanderers into the hills and awaiting the bottling process of the theatre to carry its tonic waters far and wide among an expectant and emotionally ill people. ”

“ How few faces does any one of us know that frankly radiate the great passions and moods of human nature! What little is left of this ancient tremendous drama is the poor pantomime of the stage. Search crowds, search {114} the streets. See everywhere masked faces, telling as little as possible to those around them of what they glory in or what they suffer. Search modern portrait galleries. ”

“ If at the theatre you see a drama represented, and you feel impelled to judge within yourself whether this or that character is well played—whether the gestures, the expression of face, and the inflections of voice are such as properly belong to the character, and accord with the affections that move him, or the passions which agitate him—then hope. ”

“ You had honorable and distinguished cast in the great drama that gave it fame in every land beneath the sun and place in the country’s every annal—a drama real as human life in tensest mood—in which every character was a hero, every actor a patriot, and 10 every word a deed—a drama, the memory of which is enduring, fadeless, and the scenes of which take form and color even now and rise before you vivid as a living picture. ”

“ No matter what you say about a performance you can hardly be sure that you have hit upon the right explanation. Let us suppose that there has been an evening of inspiring success. Some golden lead of the imagination has sprung up and overshot one performance—paused, passed and vanished—leaving audience and actors, and even critics, to account for it as they may. ”

“ To our eyes the legitimate drama of to-day is the one in which the day is reflected, both in costume and speech, and which touches the affections, the passions, the humor, of the present time. The brilliant success of the few good plays that have been written out of the rich life which we now live—the most varied, fruitful, and dramatically suggestive—ought to rid us forever of the buskin-fustian, except as a pantomimic or spectacular curiosity. ”

“ Here is entrancing change and flow of pattern, but here is human striving and performance, too; and the emotions of the audience are touched more directly and more deeply because picture and drama have been fused into a single art. ”

“ Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form. ”

“ These traps of scene, of situation, of climax, of acts and tableaux or of whatever they are, require to be set and adjusted with the utmost nicety and skill so that they will spring at the precise instant and in the precise manner to seize and hold the admiration—sympathy—interest—or whatever they may be intended to capture, of an audience. ”

“ Then I re-read them, to judge of them not merely as dramas for the closet, but as dramas for the stage, written to be acted, not to be read; or, at all events, as far as the general public were concerned, to be acted first, and to be read afterwards. As acting dramas, it is difficult to conceive anything less practically dramatic. ”

“ While engaged at the theatre, or in the perusal of works of fiction, we allow the scenes, characters, and incidents to pass before 'our mind's eye', and move our feelings, without asking, or stopping a moment to ask, whether they are real or true. ”

“ In the speculation of his own good parts, his eyes, like a drunkard's, see all double, and his fancy, like an old man's spectacles, make a great letter in a small print. He imagines every place where he comes his theater, and not a look stirring but his spectator ”