“The trope was eminently Oakeshottian. Politics was not a battle of interests, or a quest for truth, or a voyage of progress – it was an aesthetic performance, to captivate an audience. But it was not high theatre (Oakeshott had also insisted that politics was a second-rate activity). It was more like commercial theatre, the drama of the boulevards that plays to our emotions or embarrassments – Rattigan rather than Racine, he explained. On this stage, Mount has certainly given us a stylish production. We might call it the comedy of reform.”
Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 2. "Constitutional Theatre, Ferdinand Mount" (1992), p. 48
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Perry Anderson 32
British historian 1938Related quotes
Press release by the Arts Council of Great Britain, November 2, 1983.
This is said to be the source of the common, but unsubstantiated, statement that Ayckbourn is the second most performed playwright after Shakespeare. http://biography.alanayckbourn.net/BiographyFAQPopularity.htm
Criticism
Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice, Greenwich Exchange, 2007, p. 23.
On avoiding the label of magical realism in “Octavio Solis’s Journey to ‘Mother Road’” https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/09/octavio-soliss-journey-to-mother-road/ (American Theatre; Sept 2019)
“I believe in neither a director’s nor a writer’s theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences.”
Letter to George Devine (10 March 1964), printed in Kenneth Tynan : A Life by Dominic Shellard<!-- Yale University Press, 2003, --> , p. 292
Context: I believe in neither a director’s nor a writer’s theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such. That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium.
“Countries with high voting rates also have high levels of political knowledge.”
Source: Losing Confidence - Power, politics, And The Crisis In Canadian Democracy (2009), Chapter 6, What If They held an Election and No One Came?, p. 159
“The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy.”
Introduction to Absurd Drama (1965)
Context: The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.
“This theatre is your theatre. You are responsible for its creation and its progress.”
the bottom of an original program for the 1936 WPA presentation of Voodoo MacBeth http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/ftsmth00.html|at.
19 April 2017 https://torontoist.com/2017/04/controversial-publisher-ward-news-send-homophobic-hate-mail-councillor-wong-tam/