Timothy West Quotes

The classical writers… playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

Suddenly we saw that you could do plays about real life, and people had been doing them for some time, but they weren’t always getting to the audiences. They were performed in little, tiny, theatres.

No producer should revive a play unless they have a very good reason for it. I think there’s quite enough about a good play to make it available to new audiences.

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language.

Anybody can decide if they have got the money to fight a case if they don’t like a particular thing, and they complain to the watch committee, local council or whatever.

When you’re writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.

There was no real fringe theatre in London until way after the war, so either a play was done secretly with a club licence or it was done openly and had to be assessed along with everything else.

The Long and the Short and the Tall made a great impression on me because it was a very ugly tale about the reality of soldiering at a time when we were being gung-ho about the whole thing of war.

There were loads of plays which were very popular before and after the war, where everybody wore a dinner jacket in the third act and it was in a house that you wished you’d owned with people that you wish you knew. It was life seen through a very privileged way.

Lord Chamberlain’s readers or controllers, which were a handful of people working directly to him, were a very assorted group of people and some of them tried very hard to be as liberal as they could.