Peter Crawleyon theatrical marathons
Does length matter? Or is it what you do with it that counts? Now seems like the right time to ask this of the stage, with show durations clocking in somewhere between a sneeze and a marathon.
Take Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical tragedy, now performed in Druid's unexpurgated version over four and a half hours. Now, experiencing O'Neill's slow-motion emotional train wreck, blow by blow, is entirely the point; you are never going to absorb the destruction of the Tyrone family if you're just given the gist. Four and a half hours, though? That's the journey time from Dublin to Kinsale.
Druid, more than most Irish companies, knows that audiences like to make an investment in an event as much as in a play. DruidSynge, for instance, the cycle of works by the playwright John Millington Synge, was finally presented as an eight-hour event, one that I look back on with equal parts respect for the company's achievement and my own. They worked, refined and honed the project for years. I sat through the thing. I'm still convinced that I worked just as hard.
In the era of YouTube, text messages and Ritalin, the long-haul performance looks, at first sight, like an anachronism. In the recent Dublin Fringe programme, in which few shows demand more than an hour of your time, the note on Gavin Kostick's production looked like a misprint: "Heart of Darkness. Duration: 5 hrs 30." Really? How many times was he planning on reading it?
Many people, like me, will have balked at that figure - the fringe is more of a smorgasbord than an eight-course banquet. But by all reports we missed out. Kostick, who recited Joseph Conrad's tale from memory (from memory!), understood that anyone who chooses to make that journey with him comes already prepared, attentive and committed; not so much an audience as a travel companion.
It sounds soulless, I know, to write about duration as though every show is a countdown to a curtain call, but it actually sharpens your focus to know how long you're in for. The pages in your right hand when you read a book help you find the pace of its narrative. It's just as useful to prepare for all nine hours of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy (Dublin to Toronto), the 12-hour stretch of Le Soulier de Satin (London to Tokyo) or even the 24 hours of Forced Entertainment's Quizoola! (anywhere to anywhere).
Now look at the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, which opened this week, and wonder again why the Chekhovs all weigh in at about three hours while most of the new plays are about 90 minutes. It's hardly news to anyone that we live faster today - we've been brought up on the blip, the soundbite and the jump cut. But while attention spans are supposedly dwindling, along with and five-act structures, large casts and interval drink orders, our journeys are becoming epics.
At the very least, they pass the time. Which would have passed anyway. "Yes," goes the response, "but not so rapidly." (Waiting for Godot. Duration: 2 hrs 30).
