Art & Creativity Quote by Ajay Naidu

Theatre, for Ajay Naidu, isn’t a sacred temple; it’s a big, forgiving canvas. “Paint with broad strokes” is actor talk for permission: onstage, you can play closer to archetype, gesture, rhythm, and emotional silhouette than the camera usually allows. Film punishes exaggeration with the merciless intimacy of the close-up. Theatre rewards it, not because it’s less truthful, but because its truth has to travel across air, bodies, and distance. You don’t whisper to the back row; you send.

The second sentence is the tell: “stretching its definition really far.” Naidu isn’t defending tradition, he’s prying it open. That phrasing carries the subtext of a working actor who’s moved between mediums and doesn’t want theatre policed into respectability. “Theatre” here becomes less a building or a canon and more a method: a live contract with an audience that can include heightened realism, performance art, immersive work, hybrid comedy, even street-level storytelling. It’s a soft rebuke to gatekeepers who treat theatre as a fixed category with the right accents and the right rooms.

Context matters: Naidu comes out of a generation for whom “legitimate theatre” and screen acting were often segregated by class, race, and access. Broad strokes can be survival as much as style - a way to claim space, command attention, and make the story legible without asking permission. The charm of the quote is its casual insistence that definition is not a fence; it’s elastic.