Tim Crouch

“'I, Malvolio' is a very, very funny show, a clown show, but there is Beckettian darkness in the character. Some real darkness, some right close to the edge of despair moments.”

“I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.”

“There is a satire that exists in 'My Arm,' but there is also an honoring of some of the stronger ideas that I've raided from visual art.”

“Uncertainty is a very good thing: it's the beginning of an investigation, and the investigation should never end.”

“To have a sense of contemporary ownership of Shakespeare is the most important thing to his work.”

“In 'Malvolio,' the audience laugh at me, and I use that laughter to crack open the question as to why they are laughing.”

“It's important for me, politically, to see that theater isn't just about the powerful.”

“As actors, we do our best to keep things light and to encourage in the audience an openness to the changing atoms in the room.”

“I am particularly interested in creating a relationship between ideas of reception in conceptual art and theater.”

“Each of my Shakespeare pieces is different to the other, but each espouses a set of philosophies common to all my theatre work.”

“It's quite rare for a group of people to come together for a live event that isn't loud music. A live event that enables thinking to take place, to take place collectively. It's unique to theatre. It's a quality I never want to see diminished.”

“A child knows when they are on the receiving end of a didactic exercise, or when they are sitting in the shadow of something else.”

“It's important to find characters that share sympathy with a young audience, not just in the story but their role in the world.”

“I'm attracted to the underrated characters.”

“I'm on a mission to make people aware that I'm not a solo artist. I'm sometimes challenged by the branding of Tim Crouch.”

“Unease is not an emotion I get often in the theatre, and I like it.”

“I'm excited about the idea of an act of theatre triggering a parallel creative act of writing.”

“'The Author' is a play about responsibility, how active we are as spectators and how responsible we are for what we choose to look at.”

“Keeping young people away from Shakespeare is like removing a link to their humanness.”

“Art is a subjective thing, and it should be a subjective thing. And the difficulty of subjectivity is that it becomes hugely problematized when you start applying large sums of money to art objects. That's where it all starts to get a bit sticky.”