Creativity Quote by Ivor Novello

Panic loves a new machine, and Novello is skewering that reflex with a calm, almost amused recollection. The line is built like a shrug: “we were told” pushes the prophecy onto anonymous doomsayers, the kind who always arrive with certainty and never stick around for the accounting. By choosing “ordinary theatre,” he’s not defending some rarefied temple of art; he’s talking about the everyday ecosystem of live performance - touring companies, West End work, the bread-and-butter stagecraft that keeps actors employed and audiences gathering. The threat isn’t aesthetic so much as economic and social: the fear that a cheaper, scalable medium will flatten the local, human one.

Context matters: the cinematograph didn’t just introduce moving images, it introduced reproducibility. Film could be shipped, shown repeatedly, and monetized without the nightly labor of a full cast. Early 20th-century Britain felt that shock in the same way later generations would feel radio, TV, streaming. Novello, a composer and matinee idol who moved between stage and screen, had skin in both games. That gives the remark its quiet authority: it’s not a Luddite’s complaint, it’s an insider’s eye-roll at the mythology of replacement.

The subtext is strategic reassurance. New media doesn’t “kill” old media; it forces it to justify itself. Theatre survives by leaning into what film can’t mass-produce: presence, risk, the charge of a roomful of people sharing time. Novello’s sentence is short because the argument doesn’t need embellishment; history, he implies, already did the debunking.