Richard Eyre
Richard Eyre
Sir Richard Charles Hastings Eyre CBEis an English film, theatre, television and opera director...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth28 March 1943
curiously likes
Theatre is castigated for wallowing in self-indulgence, but it's curiously unsentimental. You simply have to move on. Everything passes. Something in me likes that.
deal developed kernel mechanisms younger
I was a chronically shy child. That kernel of my younger self is still there, but I've developed mechanisms to deal with it.
ambiguous deal rather wary
Governments have always been wary of the arts because they're wayward and ambiguous and because they deal with feelings rather than facts.
opening performance production social wary wound
I'm never comfortable at theatre opening nights. If it's my own production I'm too wound up to be able to enjoy the performance and too wary to enjoy the event as a social occasion.
chance denied fantasy held means social solely
If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.
arts behaviour believe creative difficult happiness ideas interest nourishing opening politics rather relationship society weapon
I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness... Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour.
balanced blaming easily maybe slip
Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents - you're perpetually a child and they're perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.
art life private public rather
Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.
art blown chemical classic engineer example grew household time until
I'm the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it.
There are those who leave without our needing to detain them; we have said all there is to say.
live-life thinking people
I am interested in the gap between what people say and what they think - the undiscovered world of people's lives. Lives of quiet desperation.