Education Quote by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Andrew Lloyd Webber is describing a very specific kind of anxiety: the audience’s refusal to “just accept that he’s there.” It’s an instinct that comes from musical theatre’s weird contract with realism. You can ask people to believe in sung dialogue, in feelings big enough to rhyme, in sets that slide like thoughts. What you can’t do, he suggests, is drop a character into the frame without earning their presence. The line isn’t about biography for its own sake; it’s about permission.

The repeated “had to” gives the game away. This isn’t curiosity, it’s dramaturgical triage. Webber is talking about backstory as structural adhesive: a way to make an entrance feel inevitable rather than arbitrary, to turn a figure from a theatrical device into a human problem the audience will track. “I don’t think people in the cinema would just accept…” also signals the medium shift. Film, with its close-ups and naturalistic textures, punishes vagueness differently than stage spectacle does. In a theater, charisma and archetype can carry; on screen, unexplained presence can read as plot convenience.

Subtextually, there’s a defense of sentiment at work. If you want viewers to invest emotionally in someone’s fate, you must first explain the wound, the displacement, the chain of choices that put them in that room. Webber’s phrasing is plain, almost managerial, but the intent is romantic: make the character’s existence feel like destiny, not casting.