We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running. Edward Albee
If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it. Noël Coward, A Talent to Amuse: A Biography of Noël Coward
Plays are the work of the Devil. Born from a cesspool of plague, whoredom, thievery, fornication and heresy. Anonymous 2011 starring Rhys Ifans & Venessa Redgrave & Joely Richardson & David Thewlis & Rafe Spall & Sebastian Armesto & Edward Hogg & Xavier Samuel & Sam Reid & Jamie Campbell et al, director Roland Emmerich, Cecil
The devil candies all sin o’er. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola, BBC 2014
Sometimes the devil doth preach. ibid.
What’s this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste. ibid. bad boy
How tedious is a guilty conscience. ibid. Cardinal
Heads I win. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 1990 starring Gary Oldman & Tim Roth & Richard Dreyfuss & Joanna Roth & Ian Richardson & Joanna Miles & Donald Sumpter & Iain Glen et al, director TomStoppard, opening scene
And I beseech you instantly to visit my too much changed son. ibid. Gertrude
It’s just a matter of asking the right questions and giving away as little as we can. ibid. Guildenstern
‘I’ve got loads of childhood memories, but none of them are really good.’ The Arbor, opening scene two sisters, 2010
‘House was horrible. No carpets. No central heating.’ ibid.
‘She [mum] used to stay up late and write and write and write.’ ibid.
‘Mum were never a touchy-feely person.’ ibid.
‘Andrea Dunbar is 18 years old. When she was 15 she wrote a play set in Bradford.’ ibid. BBC Arena 1980
‘Quite frankly, I’d rather not been born.’ ibid.
‘That’s where I spent my small years – in the pub.’ ibid.
‘And then it just went downhill very fast.’ ibid.
What a real playwright has to do is to say to the audience in effect – this is what you think, you are seeing in life every day, and turn it around and say – This is what it really is. Arthur Miller: Writer, Sky Atlantic 2018
My father had become a national icon of the theatre decades before I was born. ibid. daughter
We didn’t have a freezer. And we didn’t have a cake. ibid. Miller
I finished the play in about five days. ibid.
From the beginning writing meant freedom. ibid.
I felt that I was out of place more than anything else. ibid.
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. The Importance of Being Oscar, BBC 2020
I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. ibid.
He was always aware he was an outsider as an Irishman so there was always an edge. ibid. Jerusha McCormack, author
Oscar’s first foray into playwriting is a play called Vera or The Nihilists, a play about Russian revolutionaries … It’s not terribly good. ibid. historian
The Picture of Dorian Gray: It caused a storm of protest in the press. People picked up on the homosexual subtext, the relationship between Basil the painter and Dorian. ibid.
Lady Windermere’s Fan is the first of the society comedies … A bad rumour has come to her ears that her husband is embarking an affair with a mysterious woman called Mrs Erlynne. ibid.
Play for Today: a series of single dramas broadcast by BBC television between 1970 and 1984: years of crisis when the consensus politics of Britain’s postwar world began to unravel, when industrial relations, education and the health-service faced fundamental challenges … Play for Today reflected and responded to all this and more in more than 300 dramas shown in prime time. Drama out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today, BBC 2020
The Wednesday Play ran for six years and featured a much wider range of drama. ibid.
Only Make Believe (1973: writer Dennis Potter; director Robert Knights) … Angles are so Few (1970: writer Dennis Potter; director Gareth Davies) … Mike Leigh: Hard Labour (1973) … Nuts in May (1976) … Abigail’s Party (1977) … Ken Loach: Up the Junction (1965) … Cathy Come Home (1966) … The Rank & File (1971) … Ann Scott: Angels are so Few (1970) … Stocker’s Copper (1972) … Richard Eyre: Comedians (1979) … The Imitation Game (1980) … Country (1981) … ibid.
The After Dinner Joke (1978: writer Caryl Churchill; director Colin Bucksey) … Shakespeare or Bust (1973: writer Peter Tarson; director Brian Parker) … Stocker’s Copper (1972: writer Tom Clarke; director Jack Gold) … Leeds United! (1974: writer Colin Welland; director Roy Battersby) … All Good Men (1974: writer Trevor Griffiths; director Michael Lindsay-Hogg) … Licking Hitler (1978: writer and director David Hare) … The Cheviot, The Stag & the Black Black Oil (1974: writer John McGrath; director John McKenzie). ibid.
Destiny (1978): ’Cause first there’ll be the blacks and Asians. Then the Jews and Irish. And this ain’t easy speeches – this is true. And then it’ll be the unions. Oh ar make no mistake. The Labour Party: that’ll do. The others too. All in the interests of the nation. And to save the nation, they’ll destroy the nation. All of it except themselves. And if we let ’em, we’ve got ourselves to blame. Our fault. We turned our back.’ ibid. Destiny: Play for Today 1978: White shop steward addresses need for solidarity with Asian colleagues
The troubles in Belfast also framed the acclaimed Billy trilogy by Graham Reid made for BBC Northern Ireland in the final years of Play for Today. The dramas explore tensions and violence in a protestant working class family. ibid.
Out of 300 Plays for Today only a dozen were directed by a woman. ibid.
Shaw’s plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces. James Agate, 1877-1947, British drama critic & novelist
Perecles’ play: The Persians [luxurious and decadent]. Dr Michael Scott, Guilty Pleasures I: Luxury in Ancient Greece: Nothing in Excess BBC 2013
400 years ago Shakespeare’s plays were collected together in a book. It remains the greatest literary work ever created. Little is known about the man who created it. Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius I, BBC 2023
Towards the end of William Shakespeare’s life he was alone in London away from his family. He was producing masterpiece after masterpiece. In a single year: Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. ibid.
The plays Shakespeare left us are not only works of genius but they also provide a collection of clues as to who he was – the struggles he faced and the forces that drove him. ibid.
How a glover’s son from Stratford Upon Avon became the greatest writer who ever lived. ibid.
Shakespeare had been to Stratford Grammar, one of the best schools in the country, where he developed a passion for history and literature. But his education was cut short. At the age of 18 he had fallen in love with Anne Hathaway who became pregnant, and they quickly got married. ibid.
Titus is a success but Shakespeare is making his debt at a dangerous time for theatre. Many of England’s political elites are religious fanatics. ibid.
Shakespeare, sensing audiences want something new, persuades the theatre to stage Henry VI instead. But will audiences really prefer his new play about English history to Marlow’s cold-blooded revenge tragedies? ibid.
But some of Shakespeare’s rivals in Marlow’s circle are not impressed. ibid.
Shakespeare now has to write plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth herself. So he chooses a subject deliberately targeted to winning her favour – the story of Richard III. ibid.
Shakespeare is called to Elizabeth’s court to perform his play. ibid.
William Shakespeare’s childhood was scarred by tragedy. When he was just 14 his younger sister died of plague. His father, John Shakespeare, a successful glovemaker who had risen to become mayor of Stratford, was exposed for illegal business deals and was forced to resign. The Shakespeare family lost everything. Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius II
In 1595 William Shakespeare is on top of the world. A few years earlier he arrived in London a broke nobody. Now he is the most famous playwright in England. ibid.
He wants to make theatre respectable by building a new kind of playhouse. Indoors and bespoke with a small capacity of higher paying higher class people. ibid.
In Stratford his son Hamlet lies ill. ibid.
By Spring 1599 work is completed on Shakespeare’s new Bankside Theatre. With a capacity of 3,000 this is the biggest theatre ever built in London. ibid.
Shakespeare completes work on the most personal play he has ever written. He calls it Hamlet. ibid.