How long is too long? That was the question asked at the gruelling West End opening of the 220-minute Gone With the Wind. I can't help but wonder how the cast copes on matinee days when, by my reckoning, they have a maximum of 80 minutes between performances.
Most playgoers have some idea of a work's natural length: go to see Hamlet at the theatre and chances are you'll be there for at least three and a half hours (four hours if the director is Gone With the Wind's longueur-loving Trevor Nunn). Yasmina Reza has hit paydirt repeatedly not just because audiences like her readily digestible parables of human behaviour, but because she folds her view of humankind at its most venal into 90-minute morsels: perfect for providing your own second act to the play in the pub afterwards.
Would Gone With the Wind benefit from being even longer? Perverse though it may sound, it would have smoothed out the awkward narrative that feels awfully piecemeal and truncated. The storytelling technique pays homage to an approach pioneered by Nunn and his then co-director John Caird on The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. That play, of course, took eight hours of stage time to tell its hero's story and was offered to playgoers either in one lengthy chunk or across two separate evenings.
A two-part event presumably wasn't an option with Gone With the Wind, which wouldn't have happened had its unknown American composer/lyricist Margaret Martin not brought the project to Nunn in the first place. As a result, confronted with lines such as "the autumn months of 1862 went swiftly by", one was all too aware of the impossible task of compressing a film that runs around four hours into an audience-friendly commercial venture.
The musical has to cover so much so quickly that its prospects for a satisfying single evening's entertainment may well have been doomed from the start. Broadway's current August: Osage County, on the other hand, whips by in three and a half hours that you barely notice, so skilled is dramatist Tracy Letts at sustaining the audience's interest.
Shows need to feel as if they make sense however long they are. No one would expect Beckett's 1981 play Rockaby, for instance, to be expanded beyond the 15 minutes or so that it takes its lone character to rock her way hauntingly and then fiercely towards death .
When Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough To Say I Love You recently premiered in New York, the 45-minute production prompted John Heilpern to work out the cost per minute. Come up with too short an event and you can't justify the ticket prices; devise an epic production and you risk losing chunks of your audience at the intervals or even during the performance - which has happened at some of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's cultural experiments.
Anyone who can happily endure an almost four-hour Civil War musical should look ahead to September. That's when Robert Lepage brings to London his latest show, Lipsynch running what we're told is nine hours. Start stocking up on snack food now.
