Declan Donnellan

This gives rise to the first of the six rules of the target:

the target is the source of all the actor’s life.

Theatre provides a safe frame within which we can explore dangerous extremities in the comfort of fantasy and the reassurance of a group.

There will always be a gap between what we feel and our ability to express what we feel. The more we wish for the gap to be smaller, and the more we want to tell ‘the truth’, then the wider this perverse gap yawns. We act constantly, not because we are purposely lying, but because we have no choice. Living well means acting well. Every moment in our lives is a tiny theatrical performance. Even our most intimate moments have a public of at least one: ourselves.

However, it is only imagination that can connect us to reality. Without our ability to make images we would have no means of accessing the outside world. The senses crowd the brain with sensations, the imagination sweats both to organise these sensations as images and also to perceive meaning in these images. We forge the world within our heads, but what we perceive can never be the real world; it is always an imaginative re-creation.