Moments of Madness

"We cannot allow the culling of First Secretaries to become Wales's own special annual blood sport. My number one target as First Secretary is to survive until the half term recess at the end of this week."
New Welsh Leader Rhodri Morgan, Observer, February 2000

"In the failed Revolution of 1905 against the Russian Tsar, a mutiny took place on board the battleship Potemkin. There were revolutionary cells aboard the Potemkin, but spies usually kept the ship's officers informed of possible rebellion. Bad food, especially maggotty meat served for weeks on end, had made the sailors listen to the revolutionaries."
Notes on Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin

"The theatre must start to take its audience seriously. It must stop telling them stories they can understand."
Howard Barker

"I personally would like to bring a tortoise on stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragon, and a fountain or water. One can dare anything in the theatre, and it is the place where one dares the least. I want no other limits than the technical limits of stage machinery. People will say that my plays are music-hall turns or circus acts. So much the better - let's include the circus in the theatre! Let the playwright be accused of being arbitrary. Yes, the theatre is a place where one can be arbitrary. As a matter of fact, it is not arbitrary. The imagination is not arbitrary, it is revealing... I have decide not to recognise any laws except those of my imagination, and since the imagination obeys its own laws, this is further proof that, in the last resort, it is not arbitrary"
Eugene Ionesco

"Something is present in works of fantasy, which can only be likened to an elixir. This mysterious element, often referred to as 'pure nonsense', brings with it the flavour and aroma of that larger and impenetrable world in which we and all the heavenly bodies have their being. The term 'nonsense' is one of the most baffling words in our vocabulary. It has a negative quality only, like death. Nobody can explain nonsense: it can only be demonstrated. To add, moreover, that sense and nonsense are interchangeable is only to labor the point. Nonsense belongs to other worlds, other dimensions, and the gesture with which we put it from us at times, the finality with which we dismiss it, testifies to its disturbing nature. Whatever we cannot include within our narrow framework of comprehension, we reject. Thus profundity and nonsense may be seen to have certain unsuspected affinities."
Henry Miller

CREDITS