Quotes by Trevor Nunn

About Trevor Nunn:

Sir Trevor Robert Nunn is an English theatre, film and television director. Nunn has been the Artistic Director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and, currently, the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. He has directed musicals and dramas for the stage, as well as opera. His well-known musicals are Cats (1981) and Les Misérables (1985). His dramas include Nicholas Nickleby and Macbeth. He has been nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical, the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical, winning the Tony Award (Musical) for Cats and Les Misérables and the Olivier Award for Summerfolk / The Merchant of Venice / Troilus and Cressida; and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.

Trevor Nunn

I so wanted to perform, and I grasped every opportunity.

Trevor Nunn

I would be terribly disappointed if anything would get in the way of my being cast in something, or if performances were canceled. It was a fix that I obviously needed.

Trevor Nunn

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.

Trevor Nunn

If you can't fully believe in your ideas, it very quickly communicates to a group of actors who need something to hold onto. They need to believe that whatever criticism, whatever comment is received, is meant.

Trevor Nunn

If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that.

Trevor Nunn

If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance.

Trevor Nunn

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.

Trevor Nunn

One fine day I discovered that more complex plays really have to be directed.

Trevor Nunn

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

Trevor Nunn

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

Trevor Nunn

The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.

Trevor Nunn

What you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to do anything. It has to do with listening, with humility and...

Trevor Nunn

When I was 13 years old, a professional theater company in my town needed a kid actor. I auditioned, and I got the part, so for just a few weeks I became a member of the company and I met some professional actors.

Trevor Nunn

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.

Trevor Nunn

Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.

Trevor Nunn

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

Trevor Nunn

The first big break was winning a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. I was very lucky, because my parents couldn't have afforded a university education for me. Without a scholarship I couldn't possibly have gone.

Trevor Nunn

I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do.

Trevor Nunn

I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater.

Trevor Nunn

Author Bio

  • NameTrevor Nunn
  • DescriptionBritish film director
  • BornJanuary 14, 1940
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionTheatre Director
  • AwardsLaurence Olivier Award; Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire