The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.
Interpretation
Staging a text transforms it from an ideal concept into a tangible experience.
This quote by Tom Stoppard emphasizes the transformation that occurs when a literary work is performed. The staging process alters the original abstract nature of the text, making it a real and dynamic event that engages the audience and brings the text to life in a way that is distinctly different from reading it in its raw form.
In practice
In a discussion about the significance of live performances, you can use this quote to illustrate how staging changes a text.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
As the centuries unfold, millions of artists will live on the moon and paint the moon and Mars as we go out into the universe.
The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.
The eye speaks with an eloquence and truthfulness surpassing speech. It is the window out of which the winged thoughts often fly unwittingly. It is the tiny magic mirror on whose crystal surface the moods of feeling fitfully play, like the sunlight and shadow on a still stream.
The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections - not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . .and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences.
I let my music take me where my heart wants to go.
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