Funny theatre quotes, quips and insults

Opening nightmares: Funny quotes about theatre premieres

We open this collection of funny theatre quotes by looking at opening nights. Rehearsals are done, hopes are high, the curtain rises…

Opening night: The night before the play is ready to open.

George Jean Nathan

I’ve seen more excitement at the opening of an umbrella.

Earl Wilson

Number Seven opened last night. It was misnamed by five.

Alexander Woollcott

If this play lasts overnight it should not only be considered a long run but a revival as well.

Alexander Woollcott

I think that first nights should come near the end of a play’s run — as indeed, they often do.

Peter Ustinov

Funny quotes on the theatre itself

These funny theatre quotes seek to answer the fundamental question: What is theatre? 

A series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Tom Stoppard

What literature does at night.

George Jean Nathan

The aspirin of the middle classes.

Wolcott Gibbs

Awful authors: Playwrights going wrong

The play’s the thing. And, if these funny quotes from theatre critics are anything to go, sometimes it’s a very bad thing.

When Mr. Wilbur calls his play Halfway to Hell, he underestimates the distance.

Brooks Atkinson

Handles symbolism rather like an Olympic weightlifter, raising it with agonising care, brandishing it with a tiny grunt of triumph, and dropping it with a terrible clang.

Benedict Nightingale on William Inge

The Amorous Prawn is a farce made out of cobwebs and mothballs, my old socks, empty beer bottles, copies of The Strand Magazine, dust, holes, mildew, and Mr. Ben Travers’s discarded typewriter ribbons. And now I really must go and lie down, and I hope I shall feel better in the morning. 

Bernard Levin

He writes like a man who wishes he was invited to more parties.

Paul Theroux on Clive James

The only thing I didn’t like about The Barretts of Wimpole Street was the play.

Dorothy Parker

The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.

Dorothy Parker

Show down: Plays undone by dud productions

Even a good play can’t survive a bad production. And some productions present rich opportunities for improvement.

I saw it at a disadvantage — the curtain was up.

Walter Winchell

There was laughter at the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.

George S. Kaufman on an alleged comedy

There is less in this than meets the eye.

Tallulah Bankhead to her companion during Aglavaine and Selysette

It only had one fault. It was kind of lousy.

James Thurber

Theatre of cruelty: cutting quotes on actors’ performances

Theatre critics reserve some of their best insults for individual performances.  

Mr. Clarke played the King all evening as though under constant fear that someone else was about to play the ace.

Eugene Field on Creston Clarke as Lear

A.E. Matthews ambled through This Was a Man like a charming retriever who has buried a bone and can’t quite remember where.

Noel Coward

Spent the evening chasing her voice about the stage as if it were an escaped canary. 

Critic on Annette Crosbie in My Place

Watching your performance from the rear of the house. Wish you were here. 

George S. Kaufman on William Gaxton

As swashbuckling Cyrano, Mr Woodward’s performance buckles more often than it swashes.

Kenneth Hurren on Edward Woodward

Fallen archness.

Franklin Pierce Adams on Helen Hayes in Caesar and Cleopatra

Katharine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.

Dorothy Parker

Guido Nadzo was Nadzo Guido.

Brooks Atkinson

Richard Briers played Hamlet like a demented typewriter.

W.A. Darlington
Briers’ own assessment: “I may not have been a great Hamlet but I was about the fastest.”

Pacing themselves: Plays and players going to great lengths

Some performers and performances seem to be playing for time.

Where Shakespeare had written the word ‘O’, she favoured us with an extended imitation of a hurrying ambulance.

Clive James on Janet Suzman

I’m a very old lady. I may die during one of your pauses.

Dame Edith Evans to castmate

It lasts one hour only, but that hour left me feeling I had spent an evening fidgeting in an expensive and pretentious restaurant while a peculiarly snooty waiter insisted on serving me, with impeccable sloth, elaborate objects that turned out to be British Rail buns in disguise.

Benedict Nightingale on Counting the Ways

Madness in their method: Quotes on thespian technique

And now a selection of funny theatre quotes celebrating those actors who bring to the stage a style that transcends talent or training.

Mr Love’s idea of playing a he-man is to extend his chest three inches and then follow it slowly across the stage.

Heywood Broun on Montague Love

He emits an air of overwhelming vanity combined with some unspecific nastiness, like a black widow spider on heat. 

Roger Gellert on John Cleese

She knows when she should come on and she knows when she should go off — it’s the bit in between that foxes her.

Hugh Hunt on an actress whose identity has been lost, luckily for her

He had delusions of adequacy.

Walter Kerr on Jay Robinson 

Artful dodges: Plays that fill a much-needed gap

Drama critics provide a valuable service by helping us identify opportunities that shouldn’t be missed.

It has taken 33 years for Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Devil and the Good Lord to reach London, but our good luck was bound to run out sooner or later.

Kenneth Hurran

Godspell is back in London … for those who missed it the first time, this is your golden opportunity to miss it again.

Michael Millington

The kind of play one might enjoy more at a second hearing, if only the first time hadn’t left such a strong feeling that once is enough.

W.A. Darlington on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

I thought it would be a pity to risk disillusion by actually going to see it.

Bernard Levin on Peter Pan

It’s payback time: Critiquing the critics

It’s not surprising that a compendium of funny theatre quotes would lean heavily on the work of the professional critics. But not everyone appreciates their efforts.

Critics? I love every bone in their heads.

Eugene O’Neill

One of the most characteristic sounds of the English Sunday morning is Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree.

Penelope Gilliatt

The syphilis and gonorrhoea of the theatre.

David Mamet on Frank Rich and John Simon

An enchanting toad of a man.

Helen Hayes on Robert Benchley

Dramatic critic: A newspaperman whose sweetheart ran away with an actor.

Walter Winchell

A drama critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.

Drama critic Kenneth Tynan

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Wilson Mizner

I have always been very fond of them … I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it.

Noel Coward on critics

Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.

P. G. Wodehouse

Physical theatre: funny quotes and quips on actors’ looks

Some critics judge an actor’s appearance on the stage by, well, their appearance. 

Mr Gielgud has the most meaningless legs imaginable.

Ivor Brown on John Gielgud

Diana Rigg is built like a brick basilica with insufficient flying buttresses.

John Simon on Rigg’s nude scene in Heloise and Abelard

Looks like something that would eat her young.

Dorothy Parker on Dame Edith Evans

Miss Massey, with her puffed cheeks and popping eyes, is torn between ham and hamster.

Alan Brien on Anna Massey

I have knocked everything but the knees of the chorus girls, and nature has anticipated me there. 

Percy Hammond

A side note. This whole section of funny theatre quotes could have been devoted to critic John Simon — who often seemed unsure whether he was reviewing plays or judging beauty contests — except his insults rarely showed anything approximating wit. So notorious was Simon for his personal attacks, that he was blackballed from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. 

Waiting for the custard pie: Actors on acting

Many actors see the funny side of the theatre and their craft, as these quotes show.

Life’s what’s important … acting’s just waiting for the custard pie. That’s all.

Katherine Hepburn

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

Marlon Brando

Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.

Rosalind Russell 

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.

Ralph Richardson

We’re actors. We’re the opposite of people.

The Player in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

You can pick out actors by the glazed look that comes into their eyes when the conversation wanders away from themselves.

Michael Wilding

In the theatre the director is God — unfortunately the actors are atheists.

Zero Petan 

Target audience: funny quotes on theatre patrons

Thanks to the structuralists, we now realise that the audience creates the play as much as the authors, actors, directors, designers and crew. So it’s their fault too.

The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure.

Oscar Wilde

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.

Brooks Atkinson

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

James Agate

Busy yourselves with that, you damned walruses, while the rest of us proceed with the libretto.

John Barrymore throwing a five-pound sea bass into a coughing theatre audience

Never to perform in a town where they still point at aeroplanes.

Bobby Mills

They have a conscious exquisiteness, a deep appreciation of their own culture.

Dorothy Parker on the audiences for Oscar Wilde plays

Behind the scenes: Wit from the wings

Here are some funny theatre quotes on sets, scenery and the technical crew who make it all work.

One gets uncomfortable for the actors when they are surrounded by cubes and cones. You can’t quell the fear that if one of them sits down on a cone instead of a cube, the blank verse will suffer.

Clive James on The Winter’s Tale

In Blitz! there are distinct signs that the sets are taking over … four motor-driven towers prowl the stage, converging menacingly on any performer who threatens to hog the limelight.

Kenneth Tynan

The scenery was beautiful but the actors got in front of it.

Alexander Woollcott

Actors are props with dialogue.

RA Rams gives a technician’s view of their thespian colleagues

If force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough.

Mark Leslie on the techie’s secret weapon

Real repartee: Witty retorts from the world of the theatre

Snappy banter doesn’t always need a script, as the examples below demonstrate.

George Bernard Shaw cabling the lead of his latest play: Excellent, greatest!
Cornelia Otis Skinner: Undeserving such praise.
George Bernard Shaw: Meant the play.
Cornelia Otis Skinner: So did I.

George Bernard Shaw wired Winston Churchill: Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend — if you have one.
Churchill: Impossible to be present for first performance. Will attend the second — if there is one.

Dustin Farnum: I’ve never been better! In the last act yesterday, I had the audience glued to their seats.
Oliver Herford: How clever of you to think of it.

Mrs Patrick Campbell to her producer: Always remember, Mr. Froham, that I am an artist.
Charles Froham: Your secret’s safe with me.

Funny theatre quotes from George Bernard Shaw

As playwright and critic, GBS was well-placed to comment on both sides of the stage.

A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.

George Bernard Shaw on his fellow critics

A young lady who cannot sing, dance or speak, but whose appearance suggests that she might profitably spend three or four years in learning these arts, which are useful on the stage.

George Bernard Shaw on Hope Booth

It is greatly to Mrs Patrick Campbell’s credit that, bad as the play was, her acting was worse.

George Bernard Shaw on Beatrice Tanner, better known as Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Caustic quotes on Shaw from his theatre kin

Shaw once said that the secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people. The insults directed his way suggest he succeeded.

When you were a little boy, somebody should have said ‘hush’ just once.

Actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell on George Bernard Shaw

The way Bernard Shaw believes in himself is very refreshing in these atheistic days when so many people believe in no God at all.

Playwright Israel Zangwill on George Bernard Shaw

He writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become a chartered accountant.

Playwright John Osborne on George Bernard Shaw

I really enjoy only his stage directions … he uses the English language like a truncheon.

Drama critic Max Beerbohm on George Bernard Shaw

A freakish homunculus germinated outside lawful procreation.

Playwright Henry Arthur Jones on George Bernard Shaw

Shakespearean comedy: Funny theatre quotes on the Bard of Avon

Myriad-minded Shakespeare has prompted a myriad of responses. 

We sit through Shakespeare to recognise the quotations.

James Aswell

Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down, unless you’re a king.

Josephine Hull

If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.

Anthony Burgess

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good — in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

Robert Graves

The Bard’s barbs: Shakespeare on the theatre

As this final folio of funny theatre quotes shows, Shakespeare’s plays within plays gave him the chance to share an insider’s view of life on the stage.

A play there is, my lord, some ten words long
(Which is as brief as I have known a play),
But by ten words, my lord, it is too long.

Philostrate on Pyramus and Thisbe, performed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?

Puck on the amateur theatre company in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

You will be scraped out of the painted cloth for this.

Costard to his castmate Nathaniel, who was heckled off stage while performing the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost 

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters.

Hamlet on ham actors

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently.

Hamlet again

Capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.

Hamlet on the groundlings in the cheap seats

Acknowledgements

This collection would have been a lesser thing, were it not for Diana Rigg and her book No turn unstoned: the worst ever theatrical reviews.

The Folger Shakespeare Library came in handy for the Shakespeare quotes.

And Lulu came up with the idea of using Shakespeare for the image. I went for the Flower Portrait as it seemed the image in which Will would remain the most recognisable while wearing a custard pie.