In 1957, “West Side Story” had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; “Bye Bye Birdie,” set in Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the citizens apparently dress mostly in chartreuse, mauve, orange, periwinkle, and turquoise, was a walk on the bright side.

In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.

Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public.

Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble.

I detest literature. I abominate the theatre. I have a horror of culture. I am only interested in magic!

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.