Audience Quote by George Bernard Shaw

“Different narrative forms naturally lend themselves to different aspects of existence. The novel is ideal for presenting the inner lives of its characters, the…

— Todd Alcott

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal,

— Howard Barker

Play is a subset of voluntary behaviour involving a selective mechanism which reverses the usual contingencies of power so as to permit the subject…

— Brian Sutton-Smith

I don't believe really good plays - interesting plays, complicated plays - can mean just one thing to every single person in the audience.

— Joe Mantello

In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be…

— Henry James

a really good play is ambiguous - which is exactly why it endures. Every succeeding generation develops theories about it. The play's words provide…

— Glenda Jackson

A play presents a self-enclosed little world for the audience to examine. It's an opportunity to look objectively at a group of people, to…

— Wallace Shawn

I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of…

— Ben Brantley

When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself,…

— Anonymous

In the first place, it must be remembered that our point of view in examining the construction of a play will not always coincide…

— Andrew Coyle Bradley

“Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state…

— Samuel Johnson

Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.

— Simon McBurney