Daily Inspiration Quote by Trevor Nunn

Trevor Nunn is quietly picking a fight with the culture industry’s favorite hobby: sorting art into sealed compartments, then policing the borders. His claim of “no disconnection” between classical theater, contemporary work, musicals, and opera isn’t just a personal quirk; it’s a director’s manifesto. Nunn has spent decades moving between Shakespeare, Sondheim, and grand opera with the same steady hand, so the line reads less like a theory than a report from the trenches. He’s saying: the divisions are administrative, not artistic.

The intent is practical and ideological at once. Practically, it gives him permission to borrow tools across forms: opera’s heightened emotion can sharpen Shakespeare; musical theater’s clarity of storytelling can discipline opera; contemporary theater’s psychological realism can keep classics from turning into museum pieces. Ideologically, he rejects the snob ladder where opera sits atop musicals, and “classical” floats above “popular.” That ladder is mostly a funding model and a status system, not a measure of craft.

The subtext is also about audiences. “The thing that we call opera” subtly demystifies it, treating opera not as sacred ritual but as a subset of theater: people in a room, a story, a live encounter. Coming from a director shaped by Britain’s institutional stages (RSC, National Theatre, West End), the quote lands as a challenge to gatekeeping: if the work is alive, the label should serve the performance, not the other way around.