A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values.

Plays are events in time and space. Plays are music. Word music. Visual music. I’ve always thought of plays as a form of composition—of text and the architecture of the experience of the full-length evening…

A play is like a free-flowing poem in some ways. The play, as you write, will tell you what the structure will be. But, sometimes you forget to ask those questions as you write and you end up spending a lot of time trying to find the essence of the play…

A play is an ever-changing dynamic theatrical experience. Every director, cast, design team, audience and reader bring new life to a piece of dramatic literature. A play is not a fixed expression, but a revelation in a particular moment in time.

My plays are clean. Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it…

Fully to appreciate a play we have to maintain a delicate balance between what is taking place apparently on two different levels of the mind. On one level we are involved in the drama, are living imaginatively with its characters. On the other level we are enjoying a performance by actors on a stage, being fully aware that we are in a theatre.

A good play is a play which, when acted upon the boards, makes an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play.

A play is fiction — and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

There is one thing that appreciably eases the strain for the plays that arrive at this time of year, and that is that practically nothing is expected of them. <small>p. 306</small>

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

Light and air, that's art! I can never give enough light in my paintings, especially in the skies. The air in a painting, that is really a thing! It is the main thing! Air and light are the great magicians. It is the sky which prescribes the painting. Painters never look enough at the sky. We must get it from above. (translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)

Play is characterised by a vital impulse that is always new, always in movement. By acting as though we are playing, we charge our action with this impulse. We free ourselves from death. Play makes us feel alive. It gives us the excitement of life. In the other model of acting we do everything as though it were a duty, as though we ‘had’ to do it.

Many plays — certainly mine — are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?