Are there any aficionados of short plays out there? I'm not talking about the 90-minute play, the pros and cons of which were debated in the Guardian a few years back. I mean really short plays: the kind that clock in at under half an hour.
Unless they're by Pinter or Beckett, playlets rarely get a look-in on our main stages. It doesn't have to be this way. Festivals and double bills are simple solutions to the argument that short plays aren't commercially viable or value for money unless they star Michael Gambon or Harold Pinter, yet such events are relatively uncommon.
The truly short play is in danger of becoming a neglected form. Still seen as inferior and limiting, it's not afforded the kudos of, say, the short story. I'm not arguing against large-scale work or the admirable monsterist movement, just against losing the art of brevity, of finding the epic in the miniature and of making every word count.
Sure, some of the pieces produced by the Miniaturists, a group dedicated to "short but perfectly formed plays", are little more than souped-up sketches. But I have almost total recall of Elizabeth Kuti's Time Spent On Trains, which conjured up the relationship between a mother and her autistic son with tender accuracy. And while there are long plays on my shelf I'll never pick up again, I keep going back to Caryl Churchill's short works: there's a lot more in them. Debbie Tucker Green's Trade lasted a mere 45 minutes and the word is that her new piece is barely over half an hour. Their duration may be short, but why quibble about length when Tucker Green's writing has the sinuous attack of a cornered rattlesnake?
I should declare a personal interest in my soft spot for playlets. I recently wrote a 15-minute script and I've started work on a second. The responses from new writing theatres have been mixed: the only thing everyone agrees on is that it's short. It will probably only get staged in the proscenium of my imagination or in my living room. I know better than to think that's a tragedy. But I'm willing to bet more than a few small gems are stuck in bottom drawers because theatres don't know what to do with them.
Tell us your thoughts: are short plays a waste of everyone's time? Do they leave you wanting more? And is that such a bad thing?
