Perfect timing
How long, ideally, is a play? In a way, it’s an absurd question. It all hinges on what the writer has to say: Pinter’s One For The Road at 30 minutes feels as right as King Lear at three-and-a-half hours. I’ve no wish to tell dramatists what to do. But a recent week of theatregoing led to some unexpected conclusions. Having sat through a nine-hour Robert Lepage epic and two 80-minute pieces, I began to wonder whether we weren’t succumbing to the inordinate or the needlessly cryptic and losing sight of the middle ground.
The happiest night of my week was spent at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. This was partly because this restored Georgian gem is, for my money, the most beautiful theatre in England. It also helped that the play, a rare piece by Elizabeth Inchbald called Wives As They Were and Maids As They Are, was a jolly account of the late 18th-century sex war and ran exactly two-and-a-half hours. At that length I felt this charming piece had, as Jane Austen’s Mr Bennet said of his daughter’s piano playing, “delighted me sufficiently”.
But social habits change. I noticed that, on some nights, Mrs Inchbald’s play was accompanied by an hour-long afterpiece called Animal Magnetism, apparently to recreate the “Georgian experience”. If you look at the theatre’s playbills, you discover that there were sometimes even three shows in an evening. Theatregoing, however, was a different experience then. Pipes were smoked in the auditorium. Fruit was on sale. And it was not uncommon to nip out between the first and third plays for a full-scale meal (or possibly to enjoy the prostitutes who haunted the theatre’s doors).
Today, we are more focused on the play. We also seem to want something extreme, as I found watching the recent world premiere of Lepage’s Lipsynch at the Barbican. Everyone knows that such nine-hour events have the strange effect of binding the audience together. But I couldn’t help feeling that the form of Lepage’s show was dictated largely by the desire to give each of the nine actors their moment in the sun. Lepage had valid things to say about the relationship between voice and identity. But was it really enough to justify a show that was two-thirds as long as Wagner’s Ring Cycle? Some felt yes. For me, length was disproportionate to content.
At the other end of the scale is the play that expels you from the theatre in under 90-minutes. Ever since Yasmina Reza’s Art, there’s been a huge vogue for shortness. The argument is that the intensity of the experience matters more than the length. I can see that. But, watching Christopher Shinn’s Now Or Later at the Royal Court, I felt that he was selling his subject short. Shinn had a lot to say about freedom of speech, invasion of privacy and western attitudes to Islam. Seeing him cram it all into 80 minutes, however, was a bit like watching someone trying to pack their entire wardrobe into a single suitcase.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that all plays must conform to the same length. Form follows function and dramatists must do what they have to do. But I wonder if theatre is missing something by its retreat from the two-act play. F Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “There are no second acts in American lives”. There are no second-acts in American plays either these days – and often not in British ones. All I wish to do is put in a plea for the two-and-a-half hour play that allows a situation room to breathe and that avoids either epic excess or undue brevity. That, for me, is the long and the short of it.