Trevor Nunn Quotes

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

Memory. All alone in the moonlight I can smile at the old days I was beautiful then.

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm.

What you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to do anything. It has to do with listening, with humility and a sense of yourself.

If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance.

If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that.

I would be terribly disappointed if anything would get in the way of my being cast in something, or if performances were canceled. It was a fix that I obviously needed.

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.

I so wanted to perform, and I grasped every opportunity.

If you can't fully believe in your ideas, it very quickly communicates to a group of actors who need something to hold onto. They need to believe that whatever criticism, whatever comment is received, is meant.

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.

I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater.

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.