For years, I wasn't in the least bit interested in opera.
'The Magic Flute,' I think, is fundamentally asking what is it to change people's consciousness.
Mozart's seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That's what I've found working on 'The Magic Flute.'
I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.
I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it's a doddle because you've got an audience.
If you're an actor, go out and act.
Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.
Theatre is the art form of the present it exists only in the present, and then it's gone.
'Mnemonic' is a play about memory.
For some years, I've been very interested in the relationship between science and art.
Most people won't order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic.
I constantly want to know - what is a table, or what is a cat?
In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo.
I've had various people close to me die, and I don't necessarily find the idea of death purely depressing.
Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.
In Japan, sometimes it's hard to know what you are looking at.
In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.
Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.
My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.
Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world.
The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it.
The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.
The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen.
Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience they all imagine the same thing at the same time.
