If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.
I think there is no world without theatre.
Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.
Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.
Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.
We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.
When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.
At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.
What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.
I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.
It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas
I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me.
In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama
Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.
Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed
It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion
Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.
Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human
Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.
The one overall structure in my plays is language
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