“The theatre is an attack on mankind carried out by magic: to victimize
an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and miss their
trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived,
drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is
also a court against which there is no appeal. Art’s relation with its
client is here at its closest and most immediate. In other arts, we can
blame the client: he is stupid, unsophisticated, inattentive, dull. But
the theatre must, if need be, stoop–and stoop–until it attains the
direct, the universal communication which other artists can afford to
seek more deviously and at their ease.”
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (courtesy of Mindy Alter)