Pastoral Resources

Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre.

I'm really keen to go back and do some theatre, but I can't afford to at the moment because we're getting married in September. And then I'm hoping to direct a film at the end of this year, and that means a year of your life without pay.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

I started off in a small theatre performance company and worked my way into commercials.

With a theatre audience there's always the additional sense of a sustained challenge of which I'm acutely aware and for which you need to have the tools ready - your voice, physicality, brain.

Theatre is a sacred space for actors. You are responsible; you are in the driving-seat.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

Thirty years ago dinner theatre used to be much more of a going concern than it is now.

I still think of myself as a stage actor. When I do film and television I try to implement what I was taught to do in theatre, to try to stretch into characters that are far from myself.

I've directed enough in the theatre and a couple of films to know that - to feel fairly secure that if I find a story that I really like I can probably get it done somewhat.

I come from a TV background, so for me this more like doing a freeing theatre piece because we'd go into a room and do the scene, instead of doing it as a wide shot, medium shot, and close up with only the odd line of dialogue.

There's something about doing theatre in London - it sinks a little bit deeper into your soul as an actor. It's something about the tradition of theatre, about performing on the West End stage.

I directed before I was even in television; I directed in the theatre for seven years, so that was my trade anyway. But in the UK, I've given up any hope of being considered a director.

I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.

I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.

One of my beliefs is that there are certain institutions within a community which stand for the spirit and heart of that community, there's the church, the local football team, the local pub and the theatre.

It's important to move the theatre into the 21st Century.

If these theatres didn't exist, the tradition of British theatre would cease to exist.