Time & Perspective Quote by Ron Moody

Film sets don’t leave much oxygen for ego; theatre practically manufactures it. Ron Moody’s line lands because it’s less a complaint than a small, rueful x-ray of how creative communities behave when they’re forced into proximity. Movies are itinerant: you parachute in, you sprint, you wrap, you scatter. That tempo turns personality clashes into logistical problems, not identity projects. There’s no time to curate a feud when the light is going and the day is already behind.

Theatre, by contrast, is domestic. “Like a little village” is doing the real work here: villages run on gossip, hierarchies, repeated encounters, and long memory. You don’t just act together; you live inside a shared micro-society of dressing rooms, notes, understudy anxiety, and the nightly public verdict. In that pressure cooker, differences don’t merely appear, they “grew” - an organic verb that suggests something slow, unattended, almost inevitable. Rivalry becomes a kind of creeping vine: fed by casting decisions, applause patterns, critical attention, and the quiet arithmetic of who gets forgiven for what.

Naming “Lionel and Georgia” makes it pointed without making it mean. Moody isn’t theorizing competition; he’s confessing to it with a professional’s restraint. The subtext is that theatre’s intimacy can be both its romance and its poison: the same closeness that creates ensemble magic also magnifies friction into narrative. Film is a job. Theatre is a town you can’t quite move out of until the run ends.