How long should a play be? Probably not 45 minutes

How long does a play last? Dumb question, I know – up there with ‘How long is lunch?’. The most recent bid for the longest play came in 2023 from the London International Festival of Theatre with its production at the Young Vic of The Second Woman, a non-stop marathon performance in which Ruth Wilson interacted with a succession of 100 different partners over 24 hours.

Yet, arguably, maybe it was one of the shortest, since Wilson did the play 100 times during the day, making the running time for each around 14 minutes.

In the short-play stakes, the current leading player is the great mistress of theatrical reinvention, Caryl Churchill. Her latest work, What If If Only, a surprisingly witty examination of the desires lying behind the desperation felt by those hit by bereavement, lasted a wonderfully distilled 17 minutes. Her earlier play at London’s Royal Court, Pigs and Dogs, was 15 minutes. But both are marathons compared with Samuel Beckett’s 1969 play, Breath, which lasts 35 seconds.

Conversely, Eugene O’Neill’s Oresteia revamp, Mourning Becomes Electra, ran to four-and-a-half hours at the National Theatre in 2003 and the second it finished I wanted to see it all again. Plays, in other words, last as long as the playwright and director think they should.

Unless they are to be on BBC Radio.

I don’t see Radio 3 controller Sam Jackson telling composers that their music must last precisely 45 minutes

Last week’s announcement that the BBC is cutting drama from Radio 3 was, naturally, followed by a statement suggesting radio plays were, to tweak David Cameron’s phrase about the NHS, “safe in our hands”. Yeah, right. The ramifications of what, superficially, seems a barely relevant matter of switching stations, are serious.

The problem is that while Radio 4 does indeed feature drama, the vast majority of its regular slots only allow for plays lasting 45 minutes (though it does broadcast 60-minute slots at weekends). Leaving aside the fact that this rules out broadcasting classics in one go by, say, Shakespeare or Chekhov, where does this leave new commissions? Telling playwrights they can write about anything as long as it runs for 45 minutes is akin to what Henry Ford, inventor of the world’s first mass-produced car in 1908, is alleged to have said to customers: they could have the car “in any colour, as long as it’s black”. And please note that along with being rightly highly prized for the breadth and depth of its drama, the BBC is the world’s biggest radio promoter of classical music, yet I don’t see Radio 3 controller Sam Jackson telling composers that their music must last precisely 45 minutes, or that the station will no longer broadcast any of Mahler’s symphonies as they all run for 55 minutes or (much) longer. Oh, and you want to hear complete operas? Forget it.

Continues…