Mike Bartlett Quotes
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If people are going to spend a night out at the theatre, they don't just want 'good' - we can watch box sets for that - they want it to be totally remarkable.
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Most theatre is still really bad. It has to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives. Theatre about theatre is the most awful, terminal nonsense.
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The days of print media are numbered. Some papers will be around for a few years, but everyone knows news is going online. Then you have to ask, who pays for it? How do you deliver it? Is there any money for proper investigative reporting?
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Theatre tends to be more metaphorical and intense, as you're locked in one room and focused on one thing. Television can hop around, and you need to invest in its naturalistic reality more. But I love writing both, precisely because they're so different.
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I am not entirely off grid. I send a lot of email. But the way Facebook constantly alters its privacy settings to bamboozle you into giving more away is just underhand.
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Quite a few plays I have written have an implicit critique of capitalism in that, if you follow it through to its end, what happens to the people who are left behind?
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Where do we invest our trust now? In politicians? Most people would say not. In banks, in religion, in a sense of nationhood? In each other? Even that has been complicated. It feels like there's a total collapse of trust, but without trust, it's impossible to have any sense of who one is.
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In the process of writing '13,' friends were asking if I was OK because I was saying things about religion or about intervening in other countries militarily that I wouldn't normally spout over dinner. In the moment of writing the play, I genuinely changed what I thought.
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The worst thing is where the world people experience before they go into the theatre is far more interesting than what they encounter on stage.
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I don't care more about '13' because it's in the Olivier than I did about 'Cock' in a 100-seat studio. They both matter because it's still a person sat there watching your play. And the play has to be good enough - because there are a hundred other writers out there who deserve to have their play on instead.
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One question you ask as a writer or any kind of artist when you start making something is, 'Does this have reason to exist in the world?' And you're reassured when you get little confirmations that people are pleased it did exist - whether they buy a ticket, whether it gets good reviews, whether it transfers.