"It's the only art form in which a group of people meet together in order to play a game of imagination with the actor, who invites them to imagine things, and that union makes them more intelligent than they are individually. Collectively they're sharper, they're more alive. The experience is more incandescent than if they were reading a book or a poem or listening to a piece of music by themselves. The desire to imagine something which isn't there is stronger in the theatre than in any other media. If we go and stand on the stage, which is a completely bare black box, and we speak with some clarity a piece of Julius Caesar, if we're any good at all, the audience will believe its Rome. They'll say: yes, those two guys are in Rome. If we bring a camera into the auditorium and film the two of us doing exactly the same thing in the same circumstances and we then show that piece of film, the audience will say: well, that's not Rome, that's a black void in a black box- where's Rome? In other words their imagination is not simulated by any visual imagery, which after all is the basis and strength and extraordinariness of film. I think what's really been interesting about the theatre in the last fifty years is that the increased visual media and, in a sense, the increased literalness of our age has freed the theatre to be more imaginative."
- Peter Hall from 'Talking Theatre; Interviews with Theatre People' by Richard Eyre
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