Theatre Family Quotes

It's good to learn early that every show is a family---complete with dysfunctional relationships, tough love, and plenty of occasion for forgiveness...

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

People say love is weak, but they're wrong: love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things - patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And every kind of love - the epic and the small, the noble and the base - the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I'll be forever grateful I did. Some years later, deep in the ruins called Theatre of Death, it salvaged everything.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's like éternel retour, it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.’ 'You do, then, fall in love.’ 'Only with fictions, I love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there’s waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start.

When unspeakable violence is enacted upon innocents, say, in a school or movie theatre, and the survivors and the families of the victims, in the throes of pain and anguish, want to ask, “Why did this happen?,” “How did this happen?,” and “What can we do to prevent this from happening again?,” and one of the areas they (still we) focus their scrutiny is that of the highly efficient weapons of warfare that are casually available to us citizens of the United States, then we frightened gun owners have the chance to be human and say, “Okay, this is a horrible tragedy. Let’s open up a conversation here.” Instead, I’m surmising, out of fear, we throw up our defenses and behave in a very confrontational way toward such a conversation , citing the Second Amendment as the ultimate protection of our rights, no matter how ridiculously murderous the firearm, which, unfortunately, makes us look like dicks.

Y'know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney,— same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. So I'm going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts about us — more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lind-bergh flight. See what I mean? So — people a thousand years from now — this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. — This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying. Said by the Stage Manager

It is not a good idea to call yourself a sardine in a family like Leo's, who will not let you forget it.

She saw beauty in ordinary little things and took pleasure in it (and this was just as well because she had had very little pleasure in her life). She took pleasure in a well-made cake, a smoothly ironed napkin, a pretty blouse, laundered and pressed; she liked to see the garden well dug, the rich soil brown and gravid; she loved her flowers. When you are young you are too busy with yourself... you haven't time for ordinary little things but, when you leave youth behind, your eyes open and you see magic and mystery all around you: magic in the flight of a bird, the shape of a leaf, the bold arch of a bridge against the sky, footsteps at night and a voice calling in the darkness, the moment in a theatre before the curtain rises, the wind in the trees, or (in winter) an apple-branch clothed with pure white snow and icicles hanging from from a stone and sparkling with rainbow colours.

Already the people murmur that I am your enemy because they say that in verse I give the world your me. They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos. Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voice because you are the dressing and the essence is me; and the most profound abyss is spread between us. You are the cold doll of social lies, and me, the virile starburst of the human truth. You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me; in all my poems I undress my heart. You are like your world, selfish; not me who gambles everything betting on what I am. You are only the ponderous lady very lady; not me; I am life, strength, woman. You belong to your husband, your master; not me; I belong to nobody, or all, because to all, to all I give myself in my clean feeling and in my thought. You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me; the wind curls my hair, the sun paints me. You are a housewife, resigned, submissive, tied to the prejudices of men; not me; unbridled, I am a runaway Rocinante snorting horizons of God's justice. You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you; your husband, your parents, your family, the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall, the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne, heaven and hell, and the social, "what will they say." Not in me, in me only my heart governs, only my thought; who governs in me is me. You, flower of aristocracy; and me, flower of the people. You in you have everything and you owe it to everyone, while me, my nothing I owe to nobody. You nailed to the static ancestral dividend, and me, a one in the numerical social divider, we are the duel to death who fatally approaches. When the multitudes run rioting leaving behind ashes of burned injustices, and with the torch of the seven virtues, the multitudes run after the seven sins, against you and against everything unjust and inhuman, I will be in their midst with the torch in my hand.

Y'know Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney, same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. So I'm going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts about us more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lind-bergh flight. See what I mean? So people a thousand years from now this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex

Oh, M. de Villefort," cried a beautiful creature, daughter to the Comte de Salvieux, and the cherished friend of Mademoiselle de Saint-Meran, "do try and get up some famous trial while we are at Marseille. I never was in a law-court; I am told it is so very amusing!" "Amusing, certainly," replied the young man, "inasmuch as, instead of shedding tears as at the fictitious tale of woe produced at a theatre, you behold in a law-court a case of real and genuine distress - a drama of life. The prisoner whom you there see pale, agitated, and alarmed, instead of - as is the case when a curtain falls on a tragedy - going home to sup peacefully with his family, and then retiring to rest, that he may recommence his mimic woes on the morrow, - is removed from your sight merely to be reconducted to his prison and delivered up to the executioner. I leave you to judge how far your nerves are calculated to bear you through such a scene. Of this, however, be assured, that should any favorable opportunity present itself, I will not fail to offer you the choice of being present.

As for my own answers to any of this? I have none. I'm far more confused than before I first went. I've had no great epiphanies, no profound realisations, but since returning home I've resigned myself to this one thing: that, putting the economics and politics of it all aside - naive as that may be - what it all boils down to is individuals. It's a simple interaction between just two people: one, a person with opportunities and choices, and who could get a flight out tomorrow should they choose; the other, a person with few options - if any. If nothing else, it's a gesture. An attempt. Food and a tent for Toto. Burns dressing for Jose. A little operating theatre with car batteries and boiled instruments, where Roberto can ply his trade. Free HIV treatment for Elizabeth, who'll never be cured and will always live in a hut anyway, but who'll have a longer, healthier life because of it. And sometimes it's little more than a bed in which to die peacefully, attended to by family and health workers... but hey, that's no small thing in some parts. My head says it's futile. My heart knows differently.

Shakespeare's plays do not present easy solutions. The audience has to decide for itself. King Lear is perhaps the most disturbing in this respect. One of the key words of the whole play is 'Nothing'. When King Lear's daughter Cordelia announces that she can say 'Nothing' about her love for her father, the ties of family love fall apart, taking the king from the height of power to the limits of endurance, reduced to 'nothing' but 'a poor bare forked animal'. Here, instead of 'readiness' to accept any challenge, the young Edgar says 'Ripeness is all'. This is a maturity that comes of learning from experience. But, just as the audience begins to see hope in a desperate and violent situation, it learns that things can always get worse: Who is't can say 'I am at the worst?' … The worst is not So long as we can say 'This is the worst.' Shakespeare is exploring and redefining the geography of the human soul, taking his characters and his audience further than any other writer into the depths of human behaviour. The range of his plays covers all the 'form and pressure' of mankind in the modern world. They move from politics to family, from social to personal, from public to private. He imposed no fixed moral, no unalterable code of behaviour. That would come to English society many years after Shakespeare's death, and after the tragic hypothesis of Hamlet was fulfilled in 1649, when the people killed the King and replaced his rule with the Commonwealth. Some critics argue that Shakespeare supported the monarchy and set himself against any revolutionary tendencies. Certainly he is on the side of order and harmony, and his writing reflects a monarchic context rather than the more republican context which replaced the monarchy after 1649. It would be fanciful to see Shakespeare as foretelling the decline of the Stuart monarchy. He was not a political commentator. Rather, he was a psychologically acute observer of humanity who had a unique ability to portray his observations, explorations, and insights in dramatic form, in the richest and most exciting language ever used in the English theatre.

[Luchino] Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe’s oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that’s the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path. (...) He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that’s too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history.

So dawned family interest, family pride, which was something quite other than clapping from a box in Wyndham’s Theatre when the curtain went up and D was standing there, smiling, bowing his head, looking from right to left and then up to the gallery, which happened at the end of the play. This was just part of something I had always known; it had nothing to do with us children but belonged to the audience, the people down there and all around, whom we should never know, who were not ‘us’.

An uneducated person has little chance of happiness. He cannot enjoy reading, he cannot understand any complicated music, he does not know what to do with himself if he has no job. How many times have I heard my friends say, ' I want to leave my boring job because I want to write, because I want to catch up with goings on in the theatre, because I want to travel and because I want to be with my family. ' The uneducated man has no such choices. Once he has lost his boring job, he feels he's lost his life. That is unfair.

Louisa and her husband gave their daughters unheard-of-freedom to enjoy Paris to the full. They socialised, frequented the theatre (where they were mesmerized by Sarah Bernhardt) and took dancing lessons with the famed Isodora Duncan. They performed at their parents’ parties and dnaced European-style ballroom dancing with close body contact with foreign men. The family’s lifestyle, including Louisa letting a Frenchman kiss her hand, raised not only eyebrows, but also rancour: the family was denounced to the throne by outraged mission officials.

In the suburbs, new homes were built with gardens, swimming pools and other comforts of family life at the back; at the front there was only a garage. Residents turned away from the street. Advertising slogans and political messages were no longer aimed at the crowd outside but instead at the family at home. The statistics speak volumes; Americans went to the cinema and theatre less often, attended fewer meetings and gatherings, spent less time at sports fixtures, in bars and cafés, or with their neighbours. Funerals, which had always been village or neighbourhood events, were increasingly a private matter.

Sir Thomas, poor Sir Thomas, a parent, and conscious of errors in his own conduct as a parent, was the longest to suffer. He felt that he ought not to have allowed the marriage; that his daughter’s sentiments had been sufficiently known to him to render him culpable in authorising it; that in so doing he had sacrificed the right to the expedient, and been governed by motives of selfishness and worldly wisdom. These were reflections that required some time to soften; but time will do almost everything; and though little comfort arose on Mrs. Rushworth’s side for the misery she had occasioned, comfort was to be found greater than he had supposed in his other children. Julia’s match became a less desperate business than he had considered it at first. She was humble, and wishing to be forgiven; and Mr. Yates, desirous of being really received into the family, was disposed to look up to him and be guided. He was not very solid; but there was a hope of his becoming less trifling, of his being at least tolerably domestic and quiet; and at any rate, there was comfort in finding his estate rather more, and his debts much less, than he had feared, and in being consulted and treated as the friend best worth attending to. There was comfort also in Tom, who gradually regained his health, without regaining the thoughtlessness and selfishness of his previous habits. He was the better for ever for his illness. He had suffered, and he had learned to think: two advantages that he had never known before; and the self-reproach arising from the deplorable event in Wimpole Street, to which he felt himself accessory by all the dangerous intimacy of his unjustifiable theatre, made an impression on his mind which, at the age of six-and-twenty, with no want of sense or good companions, was durable in its happy effects. He became what he ought to be: useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not living merely for himself.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water. Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up: “are ghosts dead are ghosts dead or alive are ghosts deadly” but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):

Once... Well, not once, not at all once. Many many many many times, there was a person who worked hard, a person who tried to work hard, and tried to do their best, and tried to do well by their family, and tried to be good, and tried to do better. Many many times they tried this. And so. The person became who they always were-- who we all always are-- A Person Trying. So they all tried and they tried and they looked around at the mountains of effort that they had built with their trying at the piles of half-built bests at the heaps of family at the hills of good enough hills and better next time, and as they looked around, as they took in the view, they saw what they had done to make the life that they had lived. And they looked to the left and saw what you had done to try to make the life that you have lived, and they took in that view. And they looked to the right and saw what you had done to try to make the life that you have lived, and they took in that view. They took it all in. And in their estimation they found all of it, their view over all of it, the sum of all of it, to be fair.

In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds would stop over in those days for a single performance in Jackson's Century Theatre. Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists - toward the transience as much as the artists. I must have seen "Acrobats in a Park" at the time I wrote the story as exotic, free of any experience as I knew it. At the center of the little story is the Zorro's act: the feat of erecting a structure of their bodies that holds together, interlocked, and stands like a wall. Writing about the family act, I was writing about the family itself, its strength as a unit, testing its frailty under stress. I treated it in an artificial and oddly formal way; the stronghold of the family is put on view as a structure built each night; on the night before the story opens, the Wall has come down when the most vulnerable member slips, and the act is done for. But from various points within it and from outside it, I've been writing about the structure of the family in stories and novels ever since. In spite of my uncompromising approach to it, my fundamental story form might have been trying to announce itself to me.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

I have talked to many people about this and it seems to be a kind of mystical experience. The preparation is unconscious, the realization happens in a flaming second. It was on Third Avenue. The trains were grinding over my head. The snow was nearly waist-high in the gutters and uncollected garbage was scattered in a dirty mess. The wind was cold, and frozen pieces of paper went scraping along the pavement. I stopped to look in a drug-store window where a latex cooch dancer was undulating by a concealed motor–and something burst in my head, a kind of light and a kind of feeling blended into an emotion which if it had spoken would have said, “My God! I belong here. Isn’t this wonderful?” Everything fell into place. I saw every face I passed. I noticed every doorway and the stairways to apartments. I looked across the street at the windows, lace curtains and potted geraniums through sooty glass. It was beautiful–but most important, I was part of it. I was no longer a stranger. I had become a New Yorker. Now there may be people who move easily into New York without travail, but most I have talked to about it have had some kind of trial by torture before acceptance. And the acceptance is a double thing. It seems to me that the city finally accepts you just as you finally accept the city. A young man in a small town, a frog in a small puddle, if he kicks his feet is able to make waves, get mud in his neighbor’s eyes–make some impression. He is known. His family is known. People watch him with some interest, whether kindly or maliciously. He comes to New York and no matter what he does, no one is impressed. He challenges the city to fight and it licks him without being aware of him. This is a dreadful blow to a small-town ego. He hates the organism that ignores him. He hates the people who look through him. And then one day he falls into place, accepts the city and does not fight it any more. It is too huge to notice him and suddenly the fact that it doesn’t notice him becomes the most delightful thing in the world. His self-consciousness evaporates. If he is dressed superbly well–there are half a million people dressed equally well. If he is in rags–there are a million ragged people. If he is tall, it is a city of tall people. If he is short the streets are full of dwarfs; if ugly, ten perfect horrors pass him in one block; if beautiful, the competition is overwhelming. If he is talented, talent is a dime a dozen. If he tries to make an impression by wearing a toga–there’s a man down the street in a leopard skin. Whatever he does or says or wears or thinks he is not unique. Once accepted this gives him perfect freedom to be himself, but unaccepted it horrifies him. I don’t think New York City is like other cities. It does not have character like Los Angeles or New Orleans. It is all characters–in fact, it is everything. It can destroy a man, but if his eyes are open it cannot bore him. New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it–once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theatre, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than anyplace else….

But the worshippers and admirers of these gods delight in imitating their scandalous iniquities, and are nowise concerned that the republic be less depraved and licentious. Only let it remain undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources; let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in peace; and what matters it to us? This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take cognizance rather of the injury done to another man's property, than of that done to one's own person. If a man be a nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed. Let them be worshipped as they wish; let them demand whatever games they please, from or with their own worshippers; only let them secure that such felicity be not imperilled by foe, plague, or disaster of any kind. What sane man would compare a republic such as this, I will not say to the Roman empire, but to the palace of Sardanapalus, the ancient king who was so abandoned to pleasures, that he caused it to be inscribed on his tomb, that now that he was dead, he possessed only those things which he had swallowed and consumed by his appetites while alive? If these men had such a king as this, who, while self-indulgent, should lay no severe restraint on them, they would more enthusiastically consecrate to him a temple and a flamen than the ancient Romans did to Romulus.

What I want is irrelevant. This is your life, Faith.

The Riviera Theatre was not my concern tonight. The Detroit River was. As a hotspot for Canada's legal alcohol coming across, rum-running was rampant. Hoodlums brought a load of hooch across and had shown up armed to the teeth. No doubt, they were wise to the fact that they were up against Detroit's underworld led by immigrants from the lower east side. None other than the Bornstein family.

Do you believe that the Palace Theatre in London has the strange tradition of leaving two seats bolted open for the theater ghosts to enjoy the shows?

Helena Ekdahl, the famous actress – who was brought to Uppsala by her rich, young husband – who bought a theatre for her – and allowed her to play in it until he decided it was time to start a family.

He quite certainly shouldn't care: and still he feels a hot sick bubbling in his gut, as if he'd drunk turned milk, or been on a drunken spree. Or been spurned in love, since damn fools seem to take that uncommonly serious, and stick knives in their guts over it all the time, in poems and plays. Romeo and Juliet, being one example, that he's read half a dozen times but never thought to see played out on the stage. Except that Ree took it into his head not a month ago, to take him to the theatre at Stratford to see it. The play's practically seditious when you think about it: Shakespeare's tale of forbidden love between a free-born human lad, and the high-born wolf-girl from the family that had owned then freed his father. At least old Will didn't go so far as to make the boy a slave, else he'd probably have found himself clapped in irons for thanks for his labour. Though of course as a wolf himself, for all his relatively low-status till he won fame from his quill, he'd less to fear than a human would have had. And even a wolf audience can sigh and dab their eyes over a tragic romance, between the two classes of men. As long as the powerless class gets no ideas of acting on that offensive gush of sentimentality.

The philosopher R. G. Collingwood once observed that the past as past was wholly unknowable. What was knowable was something different: the elements of the past which had been residually preserved in the present. In other words, what we take to be knowledge of past reality derives in fact from those texts, artefacts, buildings, belief systems, memories and traditions which have somehow survived and are amenable to investigation—and interpretation. History can only be written from the standpoint of present reality and can never encompass either the totality of events or the fullness of meaning. The historical consciousness inevitably selects and orders its material in accordance with contemporary concerns which consciously or unconsciously determine the frame of reference of its operations. However, while the being of the past may be unknowable in an absolute sense its effects remain relentlessly present; its traces surround us and form the theatre of our actions; it is through our relation to history (personal, family, collective) that we acquire an individual identity within culture.

Keep a good ship,' his father had always said, and by that you should run your company, and your family as if it was a mighty ship of war.

It was an amazing vision. Few stretches of Central Europe have been the theatre for so much history. Beyond which watershed lay the pass where Hannibal's elephants had slithered downhill? Only a few miles away, the frontier of the Roman Empire had begun. Deep in those mythical forests that the river reflected for many days' march, the German tribes, Rome's Nemesis, had waited for their hour to strike. The Roman limes followed the river's southern bank all the way to the Black Sea. The same valley, functioning in reverse, funneled half the barbarians of Asia into Central Europe and just below my eyrie, heading upstream, the Huns entered and left again before swimming their ponies across the Rhine - or trotting them over the ice - until, foiled by a miracle, they drew rein a little short of Paris. Charlemagne stalked across the corner of his empire to destroy the Avars in Pannonia and a few leagues southwest, the ruins of Hohenstaufen, home of the family that plunged Emperors and Popes into centuries of vendetta, crumbled still.

The 15-layer was already spoken for, of course, in its capacity as the sympathy group. The 5-layer seemed to function as the support clique – the small group of people willing to provide unstinting emotional, physical and financial help and advice. I often refer to this layer as the shoulders-to-cry-on friends. The 15-layer is probably where you draw most of your everyday social companions from – the people you invite round for a quiet dinner or an evening out at the pub or theatre. I am inclined to think of the 50-layer as your party friends: the people you would invite round for a weekend BBQ or a celebratory birthday or anniversary party. The 150-layer is what you might call the wedding/bar mitzvah/funeral group – the people that would turn up to your once-in-a-lifetime events. It also probably contains most of the children of your closer friends. Otherwise, our women’s network data suggest that this layer is mainly populated by members of your extended family – people whose friendship does not need much regular reinforcement because it is held in place by the ties of kinship.

Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn’t look for biosurvival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. “You can’t live without money,” as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.

After another forty-five minutes, the train reached the station at Heron's Point, a seaside town located in the sunniest region in England. Even now in autumn, the weather was mild and clear, the air humid with healthful sea breezes. Heron's Point was sheltered by a high cliff that jutted far out into the sea and helped to create the town's own small climate. It was an ideal refuge for convalescents and the elderly, with a local medical community and an assortment of clinics and therapeutic baths. It was also a fashionable resort, featuring shops, drives and promenades, a theatre, and recreations such as golf and boating. The Marsdens had often come here to stay with the duke's family, the Challons, especially in summer. The children had splashed and swum in the private sandy cove, and sailed near the shore in little skiffs. On hot days they had gone to shop in town for ices and sweets. In the evenings, they had relaxed and played on the Challons' back veranda, while music from the town band floated up from the concert pavilion. Merritt was glad to bring Keir to a familiar place where so many happy memories had been created. The seaside house, airy and calm and gracious, would be a perfect place for him to convalesce.

Mr Berry: We are not childhood sweethearts, we are not in the first flush of youth, we are not Romeo and Juliet. Mrs Berry: No ... we are the warring what's-their-names families of Romeo and Juliet.

Sisi arrives to the family party in her new blush moire dress and a mood.

First published in 2020 this book contains over 560 easily readable compact entries in systematic order augmented by an extensive bibliography, an alphabetical list of countries and locations of individuals final resting places (where known) and a day and month list in consecutive order of when an individual died. It details the deaths of individuals, who died too early and often in tragic circumstances, from film, literature, music, theatre, and television, and the achievements they left behind. In addition, some ordinary people who died in bizarre, freak, or strange circumstances are also included. It does not matter if they were famous or just celebrated by a few individuals, all the people in this book left behind family, friends and in some instances devotees who idolised them. Our heartfelt thoughts and sympathies go out to all those affected by each persons death. Whether you are concerned about yourself, a loved one, a friend, or a work colleague there are many helplines and support groups that offer confidential non-judgemental help, guidance and advice on mental health problems (such as anxiety, bereavement, depression, despair, distress, stress, substance abuse, suicidal feelings, and trauma). Support can be by phone, email, face-to-face counselling, courses, and self-help groups. Details can be found online or at your local health care organisation. There are many conspiracy theories, rumours, cover-ups, allegations, sensationalism, and myths about the cause of some individual’s deaths. Only the facts known at the time of writing are included in this book. Some important information is deliberately kept secret or undisclosed. Sometimes not until 20 or even 30 years later are full details of an accident or incident released or in some cases found during extensive research. Similarly, unsolved murders can be reinvestigated years later if new information becomes known. In some cases, 50 years on there are those who continue to investigate what they consider are alleged cover-ups. The first name in an entry is that by which a person was generally known. Where relevant their real name is included in brackets. Date of Death | In the entry detailing the date an individual died their age at the time of their death is recorded in brackets. Final Resting Place | Where known details of a persons final resting place are included. “Unknown” | Used when there is insufficient evidence available to the authorities to establish whether an individuals’ death was due to suicide, accident or caused by another. Statistics The following statistics are derived from the 579 individual “cause of death” entries included in this publication. The top five causes of death are, Heart attack/failure 88 (15.2%) Cancer 55 (9.5%) Fatal injuries (plane crash) 43 (7.4%) Fatal injuries (vehicle crash/collision) 39 (6.7%) Asphyxiation (Suicide) 23 (4%). extract from 'Untimely and Tragic Deaths of the Renowned, The Celebrated, The Iconic

There is no perfect family. We have no perfect parents, we are not perfect, do not get married to a perfect person, neither do we have perfect children.  We have complaints about each other. We are disappointed by one another. Therefore, there is no healthy marriage or healthy family without the exercise of forgiveness. Forgiveness is vital to our emotional health and spiritual survival. Without forgiveness, the family becomes a theatre of conflict and a bastion of grievances. Without forgiveness, the family becomes sick.

Earlier, Susanne’s husband had detected a certain ticking in her, a bomb. He’d packed their children into the car and set out for a night of pizza and a double feature at the second-run movie theatre, leaving her alone to explode, splattering the house with a combination of things she’d ingested as a teen-ager, certain films and punk-rock records that confirmed what she’d guessed: one dies alone. Best to have her family out of the way. Best to have them hidden in a dark cinema when the desire to chop her hair roughly and live on cigarettes surged. These bursts of freedom, while infrequent, were dangerous. Their self-indulgence could tear holes in evenings, marriages, families. She’d been lost in the roar of the vacuum—a device that had the power to put her under a spell, into a trancelike state from which she could most easily contemplate the nature of the universe, the purpose of love, the purpose of death, and a fantasy she sometimes had of being bound nude to a parking meter in the city.