"It's important to move the theatre into the 21st Century"
About this Quote
The line reads like a polite mission statement, but it carries a quiet provocation: theatre, for all its claims to timelessness, can calcify into a museum of good intentions. Coming from David Soul - a screen-era celebrity whose fame was built on a medium that reinvented itself every decade - the insistence on the "21st Century" isn’t a techy slogan so much as a cultural dare. It’s an actor pointing at the gap between what theatre says it is (alive, immediate, in the room) and how it can behave (ritualized, inherited, insulated).
The intent is pragmatic: make theatre feel contemporary in form, subject, and audience relationship. The subtext is sharper: theatre risks becoming an exclusive hobby for people who already know the rules. "Important" is doing a lot of work here; it implies urgency, not preference. It also smuggles in a critique of nostalgia-driven programming - the safe revivals, the reverent classics - that can turn a supposedly living art into a greatest-hits circuit.
Context matters because Soul’s career bridges pop culture and stage craft. He understands mass attention, speed, and the way audiences are trained by screens to expect immediacy and relevance. The quote isn’t asking theatre to compete with Netflix on spectacle; it’s asking it to compete on meaning: to speak in the vernacular of now, to widen access, to experiment without apologizing. Theatres that refuse that challenge don’t preserve tradition; they preserve a shrinking audience.
The intent is pragmatic: make theatre feel contemporary in form, subject, and audience relationship. The subtext is sharper: theatre risks becoming an exclusive hobby for people who already know the rules. "Important" is doing a lot of work here; it implies urgency, not preference. It also smuggles in a critique of nostalgia-driven programming - the safe revivals, the reverent classics - that can turn a supposedly living art into a greatest-hits circuit.
Context matters because Soul’s career bridges pop culture and stage craft. He understands mass attention, speed, and the way audiences are trained by screens to expect immediacy and relevance. The quote isn’t asking theatre to compete with Netflix on spectacle; it’s asking it to compete on meaning: to speak in the vernacular of now, to widen access, to experiment without apologizing. Theatres that refuse that challenge don’t preserve tradition; they preserve a shrinking audience.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reinvention |
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