In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here.

With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time.

In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo.

Simon McBurney Quotes