Samuel Beckett: Not I TV - Star Trek: Voyager TV - Rude Britannia TV - Seneca - Oscar Wilde - Anton Chekhov - Doing Chekhov TV - Voltaire - Arthur Miller - Frederic Reynolds - William Shakespeare - John Dryden - Samuel Johnson - Thomas Kyd - Alexander Pope - Francis Quaries - George Bernard Shaw - T S Eliot - John Ruskin - David Mamet - Roundhead or Cavalier: Which One Are You? TV - Tom Stoppard - Edward Albee - Noel Coward - Anonymous 2011 - John Webster - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 1966 - The Arbor 2010 - Arthur Miller: Writer TV - The Importance of Being Oscar TV - Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today TV - James Agate - Michael Scott -
Attacking those nerves, Samuel Beckett expressed what he saw as the bleak and desperate desolation of our lives. But his writing is also about finding ways to face up to that, to endure, to carry on and to laugh. Samuel Beckett: Not I, Sky Arts starring Lisa Dwan, Royal Court Theatre, Sky Arts 2013
Not I is one of Samuel Beckett’s most remarkable plays written in his mid-sixties. ibid.
His play Waiting For Godot was first staged in Paris in 1953. ibid.
Not I was written in Paris in 1972. ibid.
Mouth: Out into this world, this world … This God-forsaken world … What? Who? No! … God? ha-ha-ha! … No feeling of any kind … What? Who? No! She! … ibid.
We’re doing another Voyager play. As soon as I can write it. Star Trek: Voyager s6e22: Muse, Kelis
You can’t change somebody’s way of life with a few lines of dialogue. ibid. B’Elanna to Kelis
Plays like Entertaining Mrs Sloane and Loot [Joe Orton] with their assault on taboos of sex, class and death were a challenge to theatre audiences. (England & Great Britain & Comedy & Plays & Theatre) Rude Britannia 3/3: You’ve Never Had It So Rude, BBC 2010
Orton’s last piece of notorious rude theatre was What the Butler Saw. ibid.
Life’s like a play; it’s not the length but the excellence of the acting that matters. Seneca
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. Oscar Wilde
The world is a stage, but the play is barely cast. Oscar Wilde
Nina: Your play’s hard to act; there are no living people in it.
Treplyov: Living people! We should show life neither as it is nor as it ought to be, but as we see it in our dreams. Anton Chekhov, The Seagull
Suppose you loved a woman – lived with her for two or three years then stopped caring for her. As one does. How do you behave in that case? What if she had nowhere to go? Anton Chekhov, The Duel, opening scene, Sky Arts 2012
A duel is a duel. I want to fight. ibid. combatant
‘They are really funny and fresh and they absolutely operate in our world today.’ Doing Chekhov, Reece Shearsmith
‘That’s the challenge of it: to try and make those gear-changes.’ ibid. Steve Coogan in The Dangers of Tobacco
The English plays are like their English puddings: nobody has any taste for them but themselves. Voltaire
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost. Arthur Miller, Shadows of the Gods, Harper’s 1958
It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves. Arthur Miller, The Crucible
It is better to have written a damned play, than no play at all – it snatches a man from obscurity. Frederic Reynolds, The Dramatist, 1789
He loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar I ii 202
The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical, pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. William Shakespeare, Hamlet II ii 424
The play, I remember, pleased not the million; ’twas caviar to the general. ibid. II ii 465
Good, my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. ibid. II ii 545
The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. ibid. II ii 579-580, Hamlet
He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze, indeed,
The very faculties of eyes and ears. ibid. II ii 596
I have heard,
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
That have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. ibid. II ii 625
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. ibid. III ii 1
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. ibid. III ii 19
O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. ibid. III ii 32
If this were played upon a stage, now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night III iv 125-126
4The famous rules, which the French call Des Trois Unitez, or, the Tree Unities, which ought to be observed in every regular play; namely, is Time, Place, and Action. John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 1668
A thing well said will be wit in all languages. ibid.
Ah! let not Censure term our fate our choice,
The stage but echoes back the public voice;
The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give,
For we that live to please, must please to live. Samuel Johnson, Prologue at Opening of Drury Lane
For what’s a play without a woman in it? Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, 1592
To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
To raise the genius, and to mend the heart;
To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold,
Live o’er each scene, and be what they behold:
For this the Tragic Muse first trod the stage. Alexander Pope, Prologue to Addison’s Cato
45,688. My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on;
Judge not the play before the play is done:
Her plot hath many changes; every day
Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play. Francis Quaries, Emblems, 1635
The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas. George Bernard Shaw
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good. T S Eliot
The last act crowns the play. John Ruskin
When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, ‘We’re all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.’ If you’re not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that. David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife
Parliament issued an order for the utter suppression and abolishing of all stage plays. Roundhead or Cavalier: Which One Are You? BBC 2012