Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Briers

There is a sly urgency baked into Richard Briers's plea: it sounds like a gentle, cardigan-wearing suggestion, but it functions as a rebuke. Coming from an actor best known for making British domestic life look both ridiculous and tender, "We need more theatres, more art and more culture in this country" is less about personal taste than about national self-respect. The repetition of "more" is doing the heavy lifting. It's a rhythm of scarcity, a refusal to accept that culture should survive on leftovers after politics and commerce have eaten.

Theatres, in particular, is a pointed first noun. Theatre is expensive, local, and stubbornly physical; it depends on public space, public money, and public attention. Asking for more theatres is a way of demanding infrastructure, not just inspiration. It implies that culture isn't an accessory to a "real" economy but part of what makes a country coherent, able to argue with itself in public without tearing itself apart.

The subtext is also defensive: when a society starts treating art as a luxury, artists become easy targets - indulgent, irrelevant, elitist. Briers counters that framing by bundling theatre, art, and culture as civic necessities, like libraries or parks. It's a quiet pushback against an austerity mindset and a media climate that prizes quick spectacle over sustained imagination.

An actor making this case matters. He isn't theorizing from a distance; he's talking about the oxygen supply of his own craft - and by extension, the public's capacity to feel, critique, and remember.