There is a remarkable nimbleness of style, a balancing act of tone, in Voltaire, which is hard to bring off on stage. When you speak the words out loud, the effect is very different from when you read them. So… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
Twenty years ago, when you bumped into someone and asked how they were, they would say, 'Mustn't grumble' or 'Getting by': now they feel… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
Optimism and happiness are not the same thing, but they are becoming interchangeable, and it seemed to me that Voltaire's Candide gave me a… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
The American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has written about this in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (2009)… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
The title's so upfront. It gives fair warning about the play's content. I'm writing about a kind of disenchantment, an anger, but quite a… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
There is a remarkable nimbleness of style, a balancing act of tone, in Voltaire, which is hard to bring off on stage. When you… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
I have adapted the whole book [Candid] into tweets of 140 characters, and these are being sent out daily, at the rate of eight… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
In the business world, the idea of positive thinking is absolutely entrenched. — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
Theatre within theatre, when characters sees themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will. — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
Even within single sentences, there are sudden changes of register. And when the travellers go to Venice, they see a play by Voltaire! This… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
Translating Candide into tweets has really deepened my appreciation of his writing - it wouldn't work so well with nineteenth-century authors. Every single sentence… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
There is the question of language. Although the play [Candid] is not written in strict verse form, there is an underlying beat of rhyming… — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image