Birmingham Stage Company

Theatre Life


13 November 2011

One of my favourite quotes about the theatre, from Shakespeare by Ivor Brown. Theatre life, with its quarrels and muddles and vanities, is a form of lunacy: but the moonbeams of that lunacy can be of a radiance that does indeed reward. Out of the tantrums and tornado or – even worse – out of the dreary flatness of a really bad rehearsal, out of the egotism and jealousy of the green-room, out of the delay and frustration and confusion inevitable in the staging of plays, grandeur may suddenly spring when the great day arrives. Then the play, which seemed to be possessed by Caliban, becomes and Ariel and ‘flames amazement’ on the audience. The occasional miracle of the theatre its inhabitants know: indeed, by it they live.


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