Oh, throw away your stopwatch (original) (raw)

"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".

For those of you who didn't read the piece, the Guardian's theatre critic argued with some force against what he describes as "the fashionable tyranny of the 90-minute play". He makes one or two good observations: audiences trained on TV advertising are quick to absorb information and no longer need lengthy exposition; social customs have changed and a four-hour evening in the theatre isn't always as attractive to its audience as it used to be. To these points I would add one of my own: that the price of a seat in a theatre may seem much less value for money when the play barely touches the 90-minute mark.

But for the most part Billington's thesis is shot through with an ignorance of the modern playwriting culture that is breathtaking for someone who goes to the theatre as much as he does, and belies a backward-looking agenda that bears as little relevance to a 21st-century theatre as John Major's whimsical fantasy of re-creating the 1950s with warm beer and cricket on the village green.

Enough of the abuse: let's get down to business. I'm from a generation that has grown up with the wise mantra that it's not length that matters but what you do with it. A handful of middle-aged white men might still believe something different, but modern Britain has moved on. Dramatists know that their first duty is to the quality of the experience they give their audience and that the relationship is reciprocal. We write for an audience that is active, participatory and alive. Theatre-makers like Kneehigh or Shunt explore explicit and provocative relationships with their audiences, and playwrights expect their audience to join up the dots when their work is performed. This is a theatre that is much closer to the one Brecht envisaged than the proselytising political theatres of a previous era that Billington hankers after as he gravely levels the charge that we no longer "allow room for debate, discussion, dialectic".

As Billington makes clear in his discussion of recent work by Joe Penhall, Kevin Elyot and April de Angelis, those plays are zinging with ideas and explore the great themes of love and corruption with subtlety, wit and passion. Whether you like them is a matter of taste but what all those plays refuse to do (and this is what I suspect the critic really objects to) is to offer pat answers and easily digestible theses that effectively lecture the audience. Having raised questions and explored their subjects with brio and passion, these writers know that the audience will make up their own minds about the nature of tabloid journalism, first love and corporate culture. This is a truly democratic public theatre, one that is engaging with its audience rather than preaching punters to death with all the subtlety of an undergraduate heckler at a university debating society. Billington might not have moved on from the plodding Shavian drama of the early 20th century, but the rest of us are trying to engage with the way we connect in the 21st century.

What is ironic is that the theatre of this new century has dynamically reinvented political theatre for our age by experimenting with factual drama. You don't have to look much further than the Tricycle Theatre and its cycle of dramatised public enquiries, or to the National Theatre and Stuff Happens, or indeed to the Royal Court with My Name Is Rachel Corrie, to see the impact of this way of working.

It is mindless to suggest that distilling human experience is something dramatists might attempt only when they have spent a number of years writing conventionally structured plays. It is insulting to imply that writers are driven by commercialism and the "Edinburgh factor" into making bite-sized plays. And it is plain wrong to speculate that modern playwrights are unaware of the playwriting culture they have grown out of. In my experience writers are "play geeks" who devour play-texts and snap up any free tickets to see plays old or new. Writers are hungry for ideas and clues for "how to solve a problem" in their own work and mostly play down writers from the canon who have influenced them as they want their work to be judged on its own merits. Billington himself writes "only a fool would deny dramatists the right to choose the appropriate form" - but that's exactly what he's seeking to do.

He hints that new dramatists aren't serious, but these forms are created out of the serious endeavour of telling stories in the most truthful, effective and expressive way possible. The drama we are creating is often more experiential and variations upon the single action are almost always the right way of telling these stories. One admired dramatist has said to me that the interval has always seemed mad for a lot of her plays because of their subjective nature - and she won't throw everything she's carefully built up to give the punters a packet of crisps and a gin and tonic. The works of Beckett and Pinter are in our culture now, and for Billington to infer that we ought to hack away at old-fashioned forms that don't express the truth of our stories is pure poppycock. What about Sarah Kane's first play, Blasted - should she have conceived her material as a traditional well-made play?

Billington isn't alone. Someone once told me that I wasn't ready to write a play like Under the Blue Sky and that I should put it away for five years until I was "ready" to innovate. As for shorter dramas "crippling ambition", this is as false as all the other accusations. Writers, like all artists, recognise that exercising restraint and tackling formal challenges free creativity and spur us on towards greater things.

Instead of clobbering playwrights, perhaps Billington ought to look for the real reason behind the current lack of variety in length. It is this: consistently over the past 20 years, as theatres have cut costs, writers have been forced to think of making plays that require fewer actors to perform them. This is beginning to be turned around, partly because of pressure from groups like "the Monsterists" demanding more resources for new plays, and because of the enlightened attitude of Nick Hytner at the National, Michael Boyd at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Ian Rickson at the Royal Court, all of whom are encouraging writers to create for a big company of actors again. As with investing in the NHS, it will take time for these larger, more inclusive stories to come through, but rest assured, they're on the way. Simon Stephens's super new play On the Shore of the Wide World is just such an example.

Why bother replying? Well, a less serious critic than Michael Billington would not be worth arguing with and recently users of the website www.Whatsonstage.com voted him the critic they most trust. Playwrights have always respected Billington, too, but as one well-established dramatist reflected: "I always thought Billington listened and cared. I know he still cares but I just don't know if he's listening any more."

I have a highly personal motive for replying, too. I have a new play opening at the Royal Court in a few weeks' time and it will play at an interval-less one and a half hours. One often despairs at critics after the opening night, but it was unusual to find myself so depressed three weeks in advance. The play is not written "from a mixture of fashion and ignorance", or because I expect it to be commercial, and it's not lacking in ambition. I don't know whether anyone will like my play but it is written with the head and the heart and it is there waiting to be experienced. Billington offers playwrights advice and it's tempting to tell him to get his tanks off my lawn and stick to reviewing. But instead I'll offer him some advice back. If you come and see my new play leave your notepad and your stopwatch at home and take the hit. Then this new play might make more sense to you.

· David Eldridge's Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness opens at the Royal Court, London SW1, on May 7. Box office: 020-7565 5000.