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IN PRAISE OF SHORT PLAYS

SIZE MATTERS | May 21st 2008

D. de la Peña (norton frantic)/Flickr

What about catching a play at lunch? Or during happy hour? Such cultural quickies might help to topple the image of theatre as an elitist, hoary old dame who only comes out at night, writes Molly Flatt ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

This spring I've seen two plays called "War and Peace", one very long and one very short. Shared Experience's adaptation of Tolstoy's novel--a two-part, six-hour marathon--is exciting and inventive. Like the massive RSC history cycle currently numbing bums at the Roundhouse, it is an example of just how ambitious British theatre can be. But Mark Ravenhill's 20-minute "War and Peace" at the Royal Court, part of his Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat season of 16 playlets scattered across London, was a more unusual and extraordinary thing: an original, well-produced and well-publicised short.

We've moved on from Victorian theatrical conventions, such as the proscenium arch and the Edmund Kean school of Acting with a capital A (well, some of us have, Sir Trevor Nunn). But producers and directors remain weirdly fond of operatically long plays. Surely it's time we truly embraced the potential of shorts?

For Dominic Cooke, artistic director of the Royal Court, the Ravenhill shorts were a great success. They were scheduled at varied times from 6pm to 8.45pm and shown in the bar rather than on stage. "Anything unpredictable in theatre is really good," he explained to me, adding that these "visceral punches in the stomach" had generated a very different kind of buzz than the more traditional shows. Lyndsey Turner, a director at the Royal Court, is currently rehearsing a similarly genre-bending new play by Mike Bartlett, "Contractions". Weighing in at under an hour, the play will be performed in the theatre's offices from May 29th to June 14th.

Written swiftly and staged cheaply, short plays can fill a gap in a lunch hour or offer a cultural quickie on the way home from work. Lyn Gardner over at the Guardian has been advocating a more varied choice of performance times; producing more shorts can be an effective strategy for artistic directors keen to lure in time-poor punters.

Over at the National, Nicholas Hytner's controversial adoption of Sunday shows marks another high-profile move away from the hegemony of the 7.30pm, three-hour epic. He is showing a similar openness towards shorts. Since 2005, the National's Connections scheme has commissioned short new works from established writers for and about that sexy, reluctant demographic known as "young people". The pieces are performed in schools and youth groups as well as the Lyttelton stage.

This summer, the National's Watch This Space festival aims to be the easiest and most appealing way to consume your cultural five a day. Open-air street theatre, music, art and cinema pieces of varying lengths will be presented at lunchtimes and early evenings through the week and late on Saturdays. The theatre is even resuscitating two one-hour wonders for a series of 6pm performances in July: Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis" and Harold Pinter's "A Slight Ache". Featuring the established talents of Simon Russell Beale, Claire Higgins and Corin Redgrave, these playlets should be able to lure more traditional theatregoers--not just the folks keen on witnessing half-hour Bolivian mime monologues in the pouring rain.

"Programming short plays has allowed us to expand the repertoire and extend the range of what we offer our audiences here at the NT," confirms Sebastian Born, the theatre's associate director. "The 6pm slot gives them the option of coming to the theatre straight after work and then carrying on with their evening, or of course staying on to see another show."

Short plays tend to have a raw, lean, contemporary feel, well-suited to topical issues, impromptu stagings and younger patrons. When Dominic Cooke directed the fairly traditional, two-and-a-half hour "Noughts and Crosses" for the RSC last year, he noticed that the teenagers watching the previews were so quick to assimilate information and follow plotlines that "they were getting ahead of the show." As a result, he drastically cut and sped up the production. "This generation's audience expectations are different," he explained. A TV, film and internet-savvy demographic is accustomed to short, condensed drama.

Fringe theatres--which appeal to younger audiences--have long incorporated shorts in their repertoire. The Miniaturists, a group of new and established writers, have been producing five 20-minute plays every two months since 2005. The shows, performed at north London's Arcola Theatre, enable the theatre to showcase a greater volume and variety of new writers, and reduce the risk of investing in a few unknown plays.

As more prestigious venues produce shorts, more writers may be encouraged to approach the form. All too often a green playwright takes a promising idea and then batters you over the head with it for two hours (an understandable instinct in an industry where length often lends legitimacy). Many of these unwieldy efforts could become forceful 40-minute wonders. Ravenhill's "War and Peace"--a punchy, political two-hander featuring a smug, middle-class little boy and an Iraq-based soldier from his nightmares--is an admittedly slight sketch. But it is meant to be. Like a provocative fragment, a theatrical blog post, the play's content and form work in harmony.

Moreover, shorts are not just for nimble young things, as the National's revival of the Wilde and Pinter plays suggests. There are a host of older shorts ripe for resurrection, from Michael Frayn's one-act sketches from the 1970s to Caryl Churchill's one-hour comedy "Bed", rarely seen since 1984, though recently staged by Green for Go, a young company. Not to mention the possibilities of more established playwrights trying their hand at the form; I'd love to see, for example, a Martin McDonagh miniature starring Ben Wishaw in my lunch hour. Such a deliciously indulgent dose of drama might do much to topple the image of top-level theatre as an elitist, hoary old dame who only comes out at night.

Of course, shorts have obvious limitations. They seem to reward impatience, perhaps pandering to a youthful greed for fast-food culture nuggets. Longer plays are often more challenging and therefore more rewarding. But why confine theatre to a single assumption of what's theatrical? If 2005 was all about Monsterism--or resuscitating large-scale works--then 2008 looks like it could be a year for miniaturism.

(Molly Flatt is a writer in London. She blogs about the arts at the Guardian and at HitchcockBlonde. Her last piece for More Intelligent Life was about "The Homecoming".)