Old golden words...

"Most playwrights at rehearsals are of as much use as a father, all masked-up and sterilized, at the delivery of a child. 'All you want to do is sit there fretting over your fucking old golden words,' Tony [Richardson] would say to me. It was an unjust accusation, but many writers do it in the stalls drooling over their precious syllables, inhibiting and even antagonizing the faltering actors with their proprietorial scrutiny...My own view has always been that a play that is susceptible to crucial rewriting in rehearsal should never have reached that stage."

John Osborne in Almost A Gentleman 1955-1966