Deeply inspired today by Grace Paley who said
The world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe, what we need is to be reminded to love it and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.
This is the purpose of Theatre for me.
And if I may rephrase Grace Paley, I would say that the purpose of Theatre is not merely to mimic life onstage, as life is all around us.
The purpose of Theatre is to remind us to open our hearts and to love what we otherwise do not see, pay attention to, or understand — to recognise that we are all part of a shared humanity, its nature and its condition.
In theatre we are invited to pay careful attention for an hour or two, offering time, presence and soulful curiosity to truly learn and empathise with the living experience, moment to moment, of human beings who are not as different to us as we otherwise perceive in our daily lives.
It gives us the rare chance to witness how little truly separates us, to watch those imagined boundaries soften and fall away, and to recognise how profoundly similar we all are beneath our rushed attempts to emphasise differences, opening a space for compassion, connection, and a renewed love and understanding.
By witnessing the full, flawed humanity of another, theatre forgives our shortcomings, renews our spirit, and gently invites us to love others — and ourselves — more deeply and more fully.
Theatre, in its essence, is a persistent, collective call to honor our shared humanity and the messy, miraculous life itself.
Ultimately, theatre is a luminous rebellion against indifference: a living, breathing ritual that gently draws us back together by asking us, again and again, to see more clearly, to feel more deeply, and to respond with an open, generous heart — to remember, to cherish and to forgive; to hold tenderly the truths we share, to honor our shared fragility, and to love all that we are and all we can become, cultivating a heart increasingly open to love, to accept, to risk, and to embrace our potential, awakening a higher awareness, a renewed compassion, and eventually our capacity for love.