Eh? What? Oh, right. Clearly I'm the best qualified person to write about a – hang on, popping out for a fag … That's better, where was I? Oh yes, 60-second plays. Perfect theatre for those with a short attention span, or just another nail in the coffin marked 'culture'?
Gi60, now in its sixth year, is the annual one-minute play festival created by Steve Ansell, split between a Yorkshire venue and Brooklyn College in New York. Ansell first created Gi60 when he was running the community development arm of Harrogate theatre, to give new writers a chance to see their work on stage. He went freelance three years ago, but kept the festival going.
Out of the 100 plays selected, Ansell directs 50 in Britain, while Rose Bonczek, head of the Brooklyn College acting course, stages the other 50 in New York. The festival now receives applications from around the world, and this year alone, more than 600 one-minute wonders sent in their work. The chosen 100 are recorded on video and made available online.
After Samuel Beckett, knocking the idea of a short play on principle isn't an option. His 1969 play Breath, which lasts just 35 seconds, gave gravitas to the form; it takes longer to read the page-long script and stage directions than it does to watch it. The play features a stage littered with debris, the sound of someone breathing and 'an instant of recorded vagitus' (that's crying, to you and me).
My issue is this: isn't theatre one of the few places left where we can escape the pace of modern life? Call me a traditionalist, but I want to take my time with theatre. It isn't an amuse-bouche, it's a slow-roasted main course. The nuances and explorations of the human condition of, say, Ibsen or Chekhov are best appreciated when the drama unfolds steadily. Watching a play should be a long, hard look in the mirror, not a quick glance on our way out of the door.
I was at Dean Clough in Halifax on Friday to see the Yorkshire leg of the festival. Among the vignettes were plenty that would be considered sketches, many of which were built around classic comedy models – the pull-back reveal or the inversion of expectation, for instance. One such is Psychologist by Henry Raby, in which a man on a couch discussing his problems is revealed to be a psychologist. In You Can't Stick That in There, by Darin Bail, we hear one suggestive half of a telephone call – "it's too big", "it won't go in", etc. Turns out the other end of the conversation is about – chuckle – a man putting a boat in a garage.
There were one or two genuinely moving pieces. Helen Elliott's The Collective Memory of Humans, Being, references Richard Dawkins's theory of memes quite beautifully. A lone politician stands in front of a crowd and asks for their trust; a woman climbs out and says simply: "We remember." The lies won't wash. Equally powerful was Yohanan Kaldi's As Time Goes By, a scripted introduction to a minute's silence, during which the houselights went up and the audience were asked to stand.
There was a familiar theatrical name among the 50 playwrights – Steven Ayckbourn, son of Alan. When your father explores human relationships so deftly, how do you step out of the shadow? Write a play about the relationship between planets. Really. Unfortunately it came off as a bad imitation of a Star Trek script.
So, is 60 seconds really long enough to enjoy a play? Possibly. If you've got a short attention span. Ooh look, something shiny ...
• This article was amended on Thursday 11 June 2009. Henry Raby, not Ruby, is the author of the short play Psychologist. This has been corrected.
As a performer and a student of performance, I find these kinds of discussion fascinating. Ahad mentions Beckett and there are other prominent performers (John Cage for example) who were known for similar feats, and he even brought up several of the pieces he enjoyed...yet implies these performances are for people with short attention spans. Theatre is not about producing a play that is "a slow-roasted main course". It's about the expression of performers and writers; in whatever way they see fit.
The pieces produced may have been uneven in quality, but there are some truly shocking "full-length" plays out there. Length does not equal quality. Yet, I'm inclined to agree that short length for the sake of it also doesn't equal an artistic performance. As with any artistic endeavour, it depends on intention.
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