Benedict Nightingale's First Play in 60 Years Debuts at INK Festival

Legendary theatre critic Benedict Nightingale takes a look back at the history of the short play as the first play he has written in 60 years is about to take a bow at this year’s INK Festival.

Back in 1969 I was invited to Oxford to see the world premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Breath. Since that meant driving 70 miles for a play lasting one minute, I said sorry, no, which I now think a pity. After all, I could have boasted I’d seen a record for theatrical brevity. Breath in, lights up on a heap of rubble, breath out, with slight cries at the start and end. Birth, life, death. And pretty well all Beckett’s plays afterwards were variations on that doleful tweet from the emotional abyss.

Some had a weird beauty and all were pretty short. Beckett was the maestro of concision and came to think his two-hour Waiting for Godot self-indulgent. He preferred That Time, which lasts about 15 minutes, or Not I, which shows only the spotlit lips of an old woman babbling out her agonising life story. Billie Whitelaw, who created the part, told me she felt she was spending 12 minutes falling into hell every night. The Irish actress Lisa Dwan got the length down to nine and somehow survived.

As Beckett knew, content should determine form. That means a great many plays should be shorter than they are. Three times I have endured Ibsen’s endless Peer Gynt and wished I could dig up his corpse and boot it into a fjord. And the only play I’ve reviewed after falling soundly asleep was Shaw’s insufferable Heartbreak House. “Oh, sorry,” said my neighbour, the late Ned Sherrin, when he realised he was waking me up three hours into our ordeal. As the camp soldier in Peter Nichols’s Privates on Parade remarked “What a chatterbox, that Bernadette Shaw”.

Good short plays, presumably meaning those running between three and 30 minutes, are more than welcome. That’s not just because they appeal to a public whose attention span is itself getting increasingly short. They concentrate and focus rather than dissipate and spread. They shed a shaft of light on one situation, issue, person or set of people. Chekhov’s Proposal, in which wrangling families halt hostilities with an arranged marriage, is an example. Would Synge’s tragedy, Riders to the Sea, be more powerful if he had extended its brusque tale of death, grief and fatalism in the Irish outback to two acts? Obviously not. And Vaclav Havel’s succinct Audience, with a clone of himself implored to denounce himself by the drunken boss of the brewery in which he was forced to work, is a masterpiece of dissident drama.

Actually, English drama’s first masterpiece lasted just a few minutes: the 14th-century York Crucifixion Play, with stolid, bored, barely competent workmen fixing Christ to the cross. And in our own time prominent dramatists have gone short: Tom Stoppard, for instance, with the hilarious Dirty Linen and the oddly melancholy Separate Peace, and Michael Frayn, with The Two of Us, four two-handers that gave him his first West End success. One of these, about a catastrophic dinner party, actually inspired his Noises Off. So amused was he at the sight of Richard Briers and Lynn Redgrave frantically changing costumes and characters backstage that he wrote the farce that’s often called the funniest of our era.

And now here am I, presuming to add my Lilliputian snippets to these proven successes. You’d think my qualification was having reviewed over 8.000 shows during a 65-year career. But I don’t think I’ve learned more than that truth comes in many forms, that less is often more, that you shouldn’t impose yourself, preach or bang gratuitously on. As the pastor said, if you’ve struck oil in ten minutes, stop boring.

Anyway, I tried, initially with a play that one theatrical friend said was too short and another too long. I compromised, writing an hour-long piece inspired (if that’s the word) by the office at the New York Times in which the obits editor toiled away beneath a reproduction of Death beating the Knight at chess in Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. No takers, I fear, perhaps because readers didn’t find my mix of media and mortality as funny as me. So when INK came calling I gratefully shrunk my aims, producing a short play in which a mad stalker harasses a woman in a train and then an even shorter one reflecting the subtler dangers of assisted suicide. Endgames, as I called it with a nod to Beckett, is the one the Festival has chosen.

I’d call it a playlet if I hadn’t been warned off by no less a dramatist than Harold Pinter. That’s what I called his Mountain Language, which I find crude, and his Family Voices, a brilliantly inventive two-hander about a boy’s escape from a cloying family. Pinter indignantly wrote to The Times saying they might be short but were plays, not playlets. Touche, Harold. I’d like the same word for mine.