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There is an audience for every play; it's just that sometimes it can't wait long enough to find it.

There's nothing like a play. It's so immediate and every performance is different. As an actor, you have the most control over what the audience is seeing.

Whether you are a writer or an actor or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else.

If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.

Even if the play is great, every day in theatre you have to question everything because the audience is new every day. I love that.

If you're going to act and do this for a living, you want to play something that the audience didn't expect.

The repetition of the theatre means you've got the time to get deeply inside the person you're playing.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.

The play is always fresh to me. It's not the audience's fault that I've said the words before.