scraps

The primary thing is that the audience know that they've come for their imagination to be woken up by a fiction, because even if it's deeply about, naturalistically about, everyday life, it's a fiction. They want this fiction to unfold marvelously for them. And the people facing them don't pretend that this is a keyhole or a fourth wall -- these are temporary aberrations. It's not a film; you're not looking through a window onto a slice of life.

The theatricality of theater is that one group is telling a story to the other, and there is this intimate relationship -- which must never be broken -- and complete shared understanding that of course it's not for real. And that is what theatricality means: of course it's not for real.

Peter Brook, interviewed for Richard Eyre's "Changing Stages," 2000

prev
index
next