Creativity Quote by Ivor Novello

There is a polite sting in Novello's phrasing: "We were asked to believe" frames the claim as a sales pitch foisted on working artists, not an organic evolution the theatre somehow deserved. He’s talking like someone who’s watched a new medium arrive with evangelical hype and a faintly predatory grin. The promise wasn’t just that film would be entertaining; it would "cut out the stage" - a blunt, almost industrial verb that makes live performance sound like waste to be trimmed.

The sentence turns on a strategic contrast: "variety and novelty" versus "even the crude films". Novello concedes the early cinema’s undeniable buzz (movement, montage, scale, stars), then undercuts it with "crude", reminding us that technical roughness didn’t stop the narrative of inevitability. The subtext is labor anxiety disguised as aesthetic critique. If novelty is enough to displace the stage, then craft, training, and the whole ecosystem of playwrights, musicians, actors, and venues can be treated as obsolete simply because the crowd is curious.

Context matters: Novello is writing from inside Britain’s entertainment world as film, radio, and mass publicity reorganize culture around reproducibility and reach. The theatre offers presence; film offers permanence and distribution. His line captures a recurring modern panic: when a new technology arrives, its boosters don’t just argue for addition - they argue for replacement. Novello isn’t denying cinema’s power. He’s questioning the ideology that turns a new form into a zero-sum weapon.