Five minutes can be a very long time in the theatre. Sometimes, in a spectacularly bad production, it can drag on forever. Conversely, something brilliant can whiz by in a flash, even though it may be a full three hours long, complete with ice-cream intervals and drawn-out classical structure. This is something that director Adrian Osmond considered carefully when he set up his SweetScar company’s Sure Shots series of bite-size miniatures a year ago. Performed in The Tron Theatre’s open-plan foyer bar prior to the main-house programme, these quickfire five minute affairs gave early bird audiences a little bit extra for money already spent, with little risk required save for the briefest of attention spans to take in something barely longer than a CD single or the shortest of stories.
Having already produced new works by the likes of Anthony Neilson, David Greig and Douglas Maxwell, Sure Shots returns to The Tron in a couple of weeks with a piece by yet another major writer, Nicola McCartney. A second offering comes in March from Catherine Grosvenor, whose debut play, One Day All This Will Come To Nothing, this will become the most curious of follow-ups to. Especially as, unlike most of the previous Sure Shots, which were penned some way in advance to their public airing, and while a rough first draft for Grosvenor’s play already exists, McCartney for one won’t be writing a word of her play until two days before it opens.
Rather than this being a familiar literary saga of writers dragging their computer fingers until the last minute of an agreed deadline, however, such an approach is, according to Osmond, “A deliberate strategy. It means we can be more responsive to current events. The last one we did, which I wrote, called The Foolish Flower, which was performed by Itxaso Moreno, we typed that up on the Monday night, and were performing it 24 hours later. Part of the idea is to try and make theatre work in a far more tense and speedier fashion than it normally can. There’s that terrible thing that exists in theatre now, where you say, here’s a situation, we need to put something on the stage about this now, but the reality is, with the commissioning process, that 18 to 24 months later that it actually goes on. The beauty of this is that literally we can open up the papers on a Sunday morning and then put it onstage on the Tuesday night. Because of that, we can’t be too proscriptive about things, but it has to balance something that maybe isn’t getting many column inches with something that is genuinely dramatic.”
Rather than being some living newspaper polemic, however, Sure Shots strength has been in accentuating the dramatic potential of the short form rather than has sometimes been the case of some contributors to Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint series of one-act lunchtime plays. Here, while gems by the likes of Douglas Maxwell and David Harrower have stood out, some of the household name prose writers have suffered from using too many words that understandably sound like they’ve merely been lifted off the page.
One long time champion of the short form is Arches artistic director Andy Arnold, who has presented a series of bumper compendiums of works by masters such as Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams hitherto rarely performed outwith student drama circles. There have also been brand new works, most notably I Confess, in which audiences of one were ushered around the building to hear an assortment of originally penned solos of no longer than a few minutes duration, and the recent Spend A Penny series of one-on-one cubicle-bound offloadings. Arnold is about to go into rehearsals for Hughie, a rare one act play by Eugene O’Neill, the American writer primarily known for epic works such as A Long day’s Journey Into Night. Even rarer is the three minute O’Neill monologue which will precede Hughie.
“If something works,” Arnold maintains, “time shouldn’t come into it. Things like Lord Byron’s Love Letter by Tennessee Williams, which we did, and which is 18 minutes long, are simply brilliant pieces of work. The way I look at it is, whether a handful of people see it like with Spend A Penny, or whether a few thousand people see something, it doesn’t really matter as long as, artistically, you put it in a context that works. Theatre shouldn’t just be about the big night out. There’s also a theatrical experience that should be seen like you look at a piece of art,” he says, with a nod to work generated at the National Review of Live Art, “which you see when you’re passing by.”
Arnold also cites Breath, Beckett’s wordless, actorless, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it construction of life and death as the ultimate short play. Whether capitalist economics would allow for such a work to be judged on its own terms is doubtful. Hence the need for value-for-money double and triple bills, as well as Sure Shots need to exists as an add-on to the main event. Such a tactic was attempted too in the late 1980s at The Traverse Theatre’s old Grassmarket home in Edinburgh, when the self-explanatorily titled Curtain Raisers series of shorts preceded the main house production during its appropriately brief tenure. Oxygen House Theatre Co too explored the potential of one act plays during lunchtime seasons at The Netherbow.
For an actor, the concentrated burst of energy required to perform such works is no less demanding than if doing a full length work. Jill Riddiford, appeared at The Arches, both in Spend A Penny, as well as the aforementioned Lord Byron’s Love Letter. Alongside fellow performer Morag Stark, Riddiford was also one half of The Brewster Sisters, a dramatic double act who in their brief career became unintentional purveyors of the miniature form, first of all via David Greig’s version of Strindberg’s 15 minute play, The Stronger.
“It was considered quite abstract at the time,” says Riddiford now, “but we didn’t want to do it in a double bill, and even though we said in advance that it was the length it was, I think some people were quite surprised.”
Even more surprising, perhaps, was the reaction of short theatre fan Andy Arnold, who was the first person in the room to check his watch. The Brewster Sisters followed up their debut with a stage adaptation of Coleridge’s poem, Christabel. While clocking in at 25 minutes, it was looked on differently by audiences. Riddiford points to what she jokingly calls “consumer resistance” to this piece as demonstrating the difference between how a long poem is regarded compared to a short play.
For her David Harrower penned monologue for Spend A Penny, Riddiford reckons she “spent as much time rehearsing it as I would a full length play. It’s all quite intense, and obviously you’d go mad if you worked on it all day and every day, but the thought processes required are the same. Watching it, I think short plays can be more mysterious or more curious about something in the way that a short story can.”
Riddiford’s fruity tones can be heard to this day over at Glasgow’s Lighthouse building, where she performs The Complete History Of Sitting, a nine minute monologue written from a sofa’s point of view by Iain Heggie. Heggie himself is something of a master craftsman of the short form, with his high rise set duologue, Waiting For Shuggie’s Ma’, being a potty-mouthed classic of Glasgow vernacular. Other plays, including Politics In The Park, similarly exploited the formalisation of quasi music hall repartee, while some of his self-explanatory Sex Comedies shorts were gloriously punchlined gags set up with perfectly observed classic structures.
“I was in the Royal Court Writers Group for a short time in the late eighties,” Heggie recalls as he prepares for his return to Glasgow for a fellowship at RSAMD. “We sometimes wrote a short play and had it performed in the same day. Dramatically, length of play roughly equals the size of the stakes. A short play has less at stake, tends to have fewer strands, fewer characters, only one climax and is more likely to be cut off from everyday reality. Short naturalistic plays (and films) often feel not like whole plays but excerpts. A short play doesn’t have space for much exposition, so may often be dependent on universal situations or familiar reference points so the audience isn’t struggling to keep up.”
In a climate where many new plays barely scrape the one hour mark, however, even what constitutes ‘full length’ is a moot point. For Osmond, like Arnold, quality is paramount over quantity. Osmond particularly looks to the plethora of one-act works that have come out of America.
“Short films and short stories are accepted in a way that short theatre isn’t,” he says. “Up until now, if it’s existed at all, it’s been a bit like a compilation tape, where you might like the rap but not necessarily the hip-hop. I suppose Sure Shots is more like a single in that respect, whereby it’s allowed to exist for what it is in its own right.”
The first Sure Shot, by Nicola McCartney, runs at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, January 23-27 at 7.40pm during Celtic Connections. The second Sure Shot, by Catherine Grosvenor, also at The Tron, runs from March 6-10 at 7.10pm
The Herald, January 9th 2007
ends
Having already produced new works by the likes of Anthony Neilson, David Greig and Douglas Maxwell, Sure Shots returns to The Tron in a couple of weeks with a piece by yet another major writer, Nicola McCartney. A second offering comes in March from Catherine Grosvenor, whose debut play, One Day All This Will Come To Nothing, this will become the most curious of follow-ups to. Especially as, unlike most of the previous Sure Shots, which were penned some way in advance to their public airing, and while a rough first draft for Grosvenor’s play already exists, McCartney for one won’t be writing a word of her play until two days before it opens.
Rather than this being a familiar literary saga of writers dragging their computer fingers until the last minute of an agreed deadline, however, such an approach is, according to Osmond, “A deliberate strategy. It means we can be more responsive to current events. The last one we did, which I wrote, called The Foolish Flower, which was performed by Itxaso Moreno, we typed that up on the Monday night, and were performing it 24 hours later. Part of the idea is to try and make theatre work in a far more tense and speedier fashion than it normally can. There’s that terrible thing that exists in theatre now, where you say, here’s a situation, we need to put something on the stage about this now, but the reality is, with the commissioning process, that 18 to 24 months later that it actually goes on. The beauty of this is that literally we can open up the papers on a Sunday morning and then put it onstage on the Tuesday night. Because of that, we can’t be too proscriptive about things, but it has to balance something that maybe isn’t getting many column inches with something that is genuinely dramatic.”
Rather than being some living newspaper polemic, however, Sure Shots strength has been in accentuating the dramatic potential of the short form rather than has sometimes been the case of some contributors to Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint series of one-act lunchtime plays. Here, while gems by the likes of Douglas Maxwell and David Harrower have stood out, some of the household name prose writers have suffered from using too many words that understandably sound like they’ve merely been lifted off the page.
One long time champion of the short form is Arches artistic director Andy Arnold, who has presented a series of bumper compendiums of works by masters such as Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams hitherto rarely performed outwith student drama circles. There have also been brand new works, most notably I Confess, in which audiences of one were ushered around the building to hear an assortment of originally penned solos of no longer than a few minutes duration, and the recent Spend A Penny series of one-on-one cubicle-bound offloadings. Arnold is about to go into rehearsals for Hughie, a rare one act play by Eugene O’Neill, the American writer primarily known for epic works such as A Long day’s Journey Into Night. Even rarer is the three minute O’Neill monologue which will precede Hughie.
“If something works,” Arnold maintains, “time shouldn’t come into it. Things like Lord Byron’s Love Letter by Tennessee Williams, which we did, and which is 18 minutes long, are simply brilliant pieces of work. The way I look at it is, whether a handful of people see it like with Spend A Penny, or whether a few thousand people see something, it doesn’t really matter as long as, artistically, you put it in a context that works. Theatre shouldn’t just be about the big night out. There’s also a theatrical experience that should be seen like you look at a piece of art,” he says, with a nod to work generated at the National Review of Live Art, “which you see when you’re passing by.”
Arnold also cites Breath, Beckett’s wordless, actorless, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it construction of life and death as the ultimate short play. Whether capitalist economics would allow for such a work to be judged on its own terms is doubtful. Hence the need for value-for-money double and triple bills, as well as Sure Shots need to exists as an add-on to the main event. Such a tactic was attempted too in the late 1980s at The Traverse Theatre’s old Grassmarket home in Edinburgh, when the self-explanatorily titled Curtain Raisers series of shorts preceded the main house production during its appropriately brief tenure. Oxygen House Theatre Co too explored the potential of one act plays during lunchtime seasons at The Netherbow.
For an actor, the concentrated burst of energy required to perform such works is no less demanding than if doing a full length work. Jill Riddiford, appeared at The Arches, both in Spend A Penny, as well as the aforementioned Lord Byron’s Love Letter. Alongside fellow performer Morag Stark, Riddiford was also one half of The Brewster Sisters, a dramatic double act who in their brief career became unintentional purveyors of the miniature form, first of all via David Greig’s version of Strindberg’s 15 minute play, The Stronger.
“It was considered quite abstract at the time,” says Riddiford now, “but we didn’t want to do it in a double bill, and even though we said in advance that it was the length it was, I think some people were quite surprised.”
Even more surprising, perhaps, was the reaction of short theatre fan Andy Arnold, who was the first person in the room to check his watch. The Brewster Sisters followed up their debut with a stage adaptation of Coleridge’s poem, Christabel. While clocking in at 25 minutes, it was looked on differently by audiences. Riddiford points to what she jokingly calls “consumer resistance” to this piece as demonstrating the difference between how a long poem is regarded compared to a short play.
For her David Harrower penned monologue for Spend A Penny, Riddiford reckons she “spent as much time rehearsing it as I would a full length play. It’s all quite intense, and obviously you’d go mad if you worked on it all day and every day, but the thought processes required are the same. Watching it, I think short plays can be more mysterious or more curious about something in the way that a short story can.”
Riddiford’s fruity tones can be heard to this day over at Glasgow’s Lighthouse building, where she performs The Complete History Of Sitting, a nine minute monologue written from a sofa’s point of view by Iain Heggie. Heggie himself is something of a master craftsman of the short form, with his high rise set duologue, Waiting For Shuggie’s Ma’, being a potty-mouthed classic of Glasgow vernacular. Other plays, including Politics In The Park, similarly exploited the formalisation of quasi music hall repartee, while some of his self-explanatory Sex Comedies shorts were gloriously punchlined gags set up with perfectly observed classic structures.
“I was in the Royal Court Writers Group for a short time in the late eighties,” Heggie recalls as he prepares for his return to Glasgow for a fellowship at RSAMD. “We sometimes wrote a short play and had it performed in the same day. Dramatically, length of play roughly equals the size of the stakes. A short play has less at stake, tends to have fewer strands, fewer characters, only one climax and is more likely to be cut off from everyday reality. Short naturalistic plays (and films) often feel not like whole plays but excerpts. A short play doesn’t have space for much exposition, so may often be dependent on universal situations or familiar reference points so the audience isn’t struggling to keep up.”
In a climate where many new plays barely scrape the one hour mark, however, even what constitutes ‘full length’ is a moot point. For Osmond, like Arnold, quality is paramount over quantity. Osmond particularly looks to the plethora of one-act works that have come out of America.
“Short films and short stories are accepted in a way that short theatre isn’t,” he says. “Up until now, if it’s existed at all, it’s been a bit like a compilation tape, where you might like the rap but not necessarily the hip-hop. I suppose Sure Shots is more like a single in that respect, whereby it’s allowed to exist for what it is in its own right.”
The first Sure Shot, by Nicola McCartney, runs at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, January 23-27 at 7.40pm during Celtic Connections. The second Sure Shot, by Catherine Grosvenor, also at The Tron, runs from March 6-10 at 7.10pm
The Herald, January 9th 2007
ends
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