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How Short Is Too Short?Dateline: 4th July, 2004In his Guardian review of Simon Stephens' Country Music (see Philip Fisher's review), Michael Billington says that plays are getting shorter and goes on
He ends with this comment: I dare Mr Stephens to undertake the dramatist's most difficult task: that of writing a two-act play. I have not yet seen the play, so I cannot comment on the justice of his comments, although it has to be said that critics' reactions to the play vary considerably, but I do feel that we should look at Mr Billington's strictures about shortness a little more closely. And I would link his comment with something I have noticed increasingly in recent years, that more and more new writers (and here I am referring to theatre outside of London, as it is non-London work with which I am most familiar) write in a cinematic style: a succession of short scenes, in fact, rather than the sustained longer scenes or even acts with which we are familar. This is, I think, inevitable. Writers under the age of thirty (possibly forty?) have grown up with cinema, video and TV forming a major part of their lives. From an early age they have been surrounded by the moving image and have absorbed its structure. They tend to think in terms of the short scene and the jump from location to location, and even from time to time, for that is what they have been seeing for as long as they can remember. It is interesting that Billington mentions the two-act play: had he been writing at a different time, he would have referred to plays of three acts, and, of course, even further back he would have talked about plays of five acts that went on for more hours than a modern audience could stomach. Today a play that goes up at 7.30 and comes down after ten is considered long. Audiences start to fidget and think about last buses. Recently I reviewed a play which came down at 10.30 and a fellow reviewer, sitting just behind me, shot out of his seat at the end and ran for the exit. It turns out he was worried about getting his car out of the car-park and had been for the last half hour! (If only he'd asked, I could have told him it was an all-night car-park!) But Michael Billington is right: plays are getting shorter. The "three hour traffic of our stage" is more and more often the seventy minute traffic, whether we oldies like it or not. It does have several significant implications, however: plays have to be more dense, with small clues giving the kind of character and plot development which a whole scene (or more) would have provided thirty years ago; audiences have to be more visually sophisticated, taking jump cuts in their stride; and writers have to hone their craft (and their thinking) more thoroughly - there is no room for looseness or sloppiness in a seventy minute piece! Articles Indices:
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