Art & Creativity Quote by Robertson Davies

Davies draws a line that flatters the brain while quietly defending the body. “Drama” here isn’t the whole event; it’s the portion that can be converted into arguments, essays, and seminar talk: structure, theme, dialogue, symbolism, moral premise. It’s the part theater people can smuggle into print culture, where legitimacy gets granted by footnotes and “interpretation.” By contrast, “what is left is theater” lands like a dare. The remainder is the unruly, hard-to-archive stuff: timing, breath, physical presence, audience electricity, the way a pause can mean more than a monologue. It’s the art that refuses to be fully paraphrased.

The phrasing is deceptively clinical, almost like a taxonomy, but the subtext is polemical. Davies is needling a modern habit: treating plays primarily as literature to be decoded rather than events to be experienced. Intellectual discussion isn’t condemned, but it’s demoted to a subset. The sentence performs its own argument by shrinking “drama” into a manageable category and letting “theater” swell into everything else that matters.

Contextually, Davies sits at an intersection of high literary culture and lived performance. In the 20th century, as universities professionalized criticism and “great plays” became syllabus staples, theater risked being admired at a safe distance. Davies reminds us that the stage is not a text with costumes; it’s a communal, perishable encounter. The jab is also a defense of practitioners: actors, directors, designers, and even audiences, whose intelligence is real but not always expressible in critic-friendly language.