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How long should a play be?

Billington (Guardian) has come out attacking the length of plays that playwrights are currently writing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1460809,00.html

He says

“the new, slavish obeisance to the 90-minute rule stems, I suspect, from a mixture of fashion and ignorance; in particular, a shocking unawareness of even the recent past when drama moved beyond a single situation or point of crisis to examine causes as well as effects”< ?xml:namespace prefix = o />

I know he is all for the “state of the nation play” but I think he misses the point about what playwrights are trying to do now.

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Here’s a riposte to Billington’s no 90-minute play article.

One from Ian Rickson (artistic director of the Royal Court)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1463920,00.html

I like “New cultural and political eras demand new forms” and “We live in a time when there is a disappointment with unifying ideology and a greater consciousness of contradiction. The old forms in which the writer diagnoses and hypothesises no longer speak to today’s playwrights.”

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Another from David Elridge, who has just had Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness go up at the Court.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1471207,00.html

this riposte is elegant, thoughtful and something I empathise with.

I like:

“I am getting impatient,” Michael Billington wrote in the Guardian recently, “with … dramatic driblets that offer ideas for plays rather than plays of ideas.” Well, not half as impatient as play-wrights are with him, as he tirelessly pursues his own agenda of trying to encourage the re-emergence of the old-fashioned polemical play whose prime function is “social analysis”.

June 16, 2005 | Filed Under  

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  • About me

    I'm a playwright and investment analyst. I have a broad range of interests: food, gardening, innovation & intellectual property, sustainability, architecture & design, writing and the arts. I sit on the board of Talawa Theatre Company and advise a CIS investment trust on socially responsible investments.

  • Recent Work

    Recent plays include, for theatre: Nakamitsu, Yellow Gentlemen, Lost in Peru, Lemon Love. For radio: Places in Between (R4), Patent Breaking Life Saving (WS).

  • Nakamitsu

  • Yellow Gentlemen