Daily Inspiration Quote by Trevor Nunn

Trevor Nunn’s line is a quiet rebellion against the museum-theater version of Shakespeare, where soliloquies arrive like sealed letters: beautiful, self-contained, and politely ignored by everyone onstage and off. His “feeling” is doing strategic work here. It sidesteps dogma and scholarship in favor of a director’s gut-level diagnosis: the soliloquy dies when it’s treated as private diary, performed at the crowd rather than with it.

The key phrase is “real exchange.” Nunn isn’t just advocating a wink to the fourth wall; he’s arguing that Shakespeare wrote for a room, not a reading lamp. In the Elizabethan playhouse, the audience was loud, close, implicated. A soliloquy wasn’t a time-out from the action but a recalibration of it, a chance to recruit the crowd as confidant, jury, co-conspirator. When Hamlet thinks out loud, he’s not simply revealing character; he’s testing ideas in public, trying arguments on for size, feeling for approval or recoil. That dynamic makes the language riskier and funnier, too: irony lands because someone is meant to catch it.

Subtext: Nunn is also defending a kind of theatrical democracy. The audience isn’t a passive recipient of genius; it’s an active partner in meaning-making. In an era when Shakespeare can be treated as cultural homework, Nunn’s intent is to restore urgency: soliloquies as live negotiations, where the actor’s job is not to “deliver” poetry but to solicit response, even if that response is silence that suddenly feels like judgment.