15 Quotes by Timothy West
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
- The foyers now look ridiculously small to us because not all that many people used them.
- The newly decorated theatres produced things like car parks and restaurants, so you could have a good night out, quite cheaply without all that bother of having to go somewhere else.
- 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.
- Towards the end of the Lord Chamberlain's era, when his hold was being loosened, private prosecutions began to happen. A member of staff at the Royal Court ordered to stop the play, and the police were brought in.
- 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.
- I don't believe in right-angled turning points.
- In 1968 the Arts Council managed to get a grant from the treasury to buy up a lot of derelict touring theatres and put them back in the hands of the local authorities.
- I got very cross with the term, kitchen sink. It just meant that you invaded different kinds of houses, where it was very difficult to avoid kitchen sink.
- Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language.
- A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.
- I'm reluctant to use the word class so much.
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