Robert Lepage Quotes

Robert Lepage

Profession : Playwright

Birth : December 12, 1957

Often, particularly towards the end of the process, I think of myself less as a theatre director and more as someone who just directs the traffic. My job is to move the ideas and bits of the show into the places where they work best. Sometimes my job is also to say, 'No.'

Robert Lepage

Reading fairytales to children expands their imaginations.

Robert Lepage

I wouldn't be happy to be a specialist. There are some very interesting artists in history who refused to be nailed down into a category, like Da Vinci or Jean Cocteau. You could say Cocteau was a great poet but also a film-maker, interested in theatre, sculpture, and could never identify with any of these forms exclusively.

Robert Lepage

Without meaning to sound crass, I've never had any psychological... help. It's because I feel my work is so revealing about who I am and what I am trying to understand about myself. It's a therapeutic process.

Robert Lepage

If you're going to do a show about somebody who dumped you, it's much richer if you have three characters dealing with different aspects of that theme. There is more space for people to identify with it.

Robert Lepage

Theatre's still expensive compared to downloading on Netflix; that has to be addressed. It doesn't mean it has to be over-subsidised by the state, but it's something we're trying to figure out.

Robert Lepage

Artists always try to make something that is going to be relevant and up-to-the-minute.

Robert Lepage

I'm trying to tell history with a capital H through histories with a small h. It moves people, because you know in your own personal relationships, your own story, there's an echo to a much larger reality.

Robert Lepage

I remember my first review in London said I was the next Peter Brook. I said: 'No way. I'm not Peter Brook. I don't have the maturity, the experience, the intelligence. Don't burden me.'

Robert Lepage

I don't think there is any kind of magic about what I do. All of the connections are there, somewhere in the subconscious or in the collective unconscious. If I let the elements speak to each other, then these coincidences will happen. And they do happen. They happen all the time.

Robert Lepage

Of course I had friends, but it was very limiting because there was always a chance that at every corner, someone would be laughing at me or waiting to beat me up. I had a very lonely childhood because of that.

Robert Lepage

I am interested in suffering and, in particular, the Buddhist idea that in pain, you can find beauty.

Robert Lepage

Writing is very much perceived as something distinct from performance. I don't see it like that.

Robert Lepage

The real writing of a piece comes only when you are performing it. It is why I like theatre. In film and TV, the image is locked forever, but in theatre, there is constant change; each performance is part of the writing process.

Robert Lepage

I find it very strange when people say that they are trying to solve 'Uncle Vanya' or find a solution for 'Henry V.' Plays aren't puzzles. They are about playing. But so much theatre has become about performing and acting rather than playing, which is a great pity because audiences are captivated by watching people play.

Robert Lepage

The great advantage of the circus, and the reason it is so popular, is really the ideal combination of art and sport. It's the ideal art form, in a certain way, if you want to be accessible.

Robert Lepage

I admire people who can spend every aspect of their life in one discipline and really go all the way. I feel the only way I could achieve some type of excellence is if I connect to other people, other disciplines.

Robert Lepage

I can't really define myself as a dramatist or as an actor or as someone who is interested in music.

Robert Lepage

I was interested in theatre, and the only experience that I had in high school was as an actor. But when I got in Conservatoire, my teachers would give me a lot of flack because I wasn't rehearsing my lines; I'd be doing stage management. I was interested in sound. I was interested in architecture. I was interested in every aspect of theatre.

Robert Lepage

In real life, I am not a lonely person; I have lots of good friends and am active socially. But there are certain aspects of my life when I have felt very alone, utterly alone, and one of them is when I am performing on my own.

Robert Lepage