An Evening with the Critics: Play in a Day
Soho Theatre, London, 12 November 2003

Dolan Cummings

Do theatre critics know what they're talking about? Are they just failed playwrights? It is childish to insist that 'you shouldn't criticise unless you could do better', but you don't have to think like that to be intrigued by a project like this.

As part of its Writers' Festival, Soho Theatre asked four London theatre critics to take part in one of its writing workshops and write a ten-minute play in a day (hence the second part of the title). A few days later, all four plays were performed at the theatre, and followed by an audience discussion with the critics (hence… you got it).

None of the plays was terrible. Indeed, it's tempting to think that there isn't time to be terrible in ten minutes, except that grim experience has taught me otherwise. In fact, a very short play is a very particular thing, and like a short story it can actually be harder to do really well than a longer piece.

The most successful of the pieces was Rachel Halliburton's Stuck, but it succeeded by resorting to stereotypes. On the way to an international relations class, a young woman is trapped in a lift in a tube station, with an obnoxious, right-wing Texan radio shock jock. It's a fairly safe bet that the average London theatre audience will identify with the former rather than the latter, and share her appalled response to his prejudices.

Ironically, of course, the audience's own prejudices are flattered. Halliburton cleverly establishes in the first few seconds the presence in the woman's bag of a carving knife, and at the play's climax this is withdrawn - admittedly to great comic effect - and plunged into the shock jock. When a West Indian tube worker announces over the speaker phone that he and his colleagues have heard everything and will happily dispose of the body, the right-on fantasy is complete.

It was only this overbearing sense of political smugness that prevented Stuck from working as an extended comedy sketch; as a play it simply lacked depth, which is not that damning all things considered. Two of the other plays felt like extracts from longer works. Patrick Marmion's Breakfast neatly incorporated the lack of depth by starting with two characters who had just met the night before and were trying to figure one another out. It seemed like a play about prejudice rather than one resting on it, but the audience was left wondering what happens next without having seen enough to really care.

Jeremy Kingston's Fencing was more whimsical, having something of the quality of one of those 'writerly' short stories that is all about not having a point. A lonely middle-aged woman chats over the garden fence to a gay man tending his flowerbeds, about gardening, and family and stuff. I got the sense that these were minor characters in a bigger story, perhaps involving the man's partner, who kept phoning, but again there wasn't enough here to draw an audience in.

Dominic Cavendish's play Human Punchbag was the strangest of the four, set in some sort of post-Apocalyptic Britain, where a young man keeps an old man in potatoes in exchange for stories about the past. It transpires that the old man was a theatre critic, and as such he is now considered guilty of having indulged himself while the world crumbled around him. The self-deprecation won a few laughs, even if the ecodoom message was addressed to all of us, and then the old man was led off for a public execution (perhaps to be directed by Rachel Halliburton).

All this added up to a decent evening's entertainment, with the post-performance discussion stimulating too. It turned out that most of the critics had tried their hands at writing plays, even if they'd never had anything performed before. But it would be a mistake to assume that as writers, critics have a special affinity with playwrights: it seems that a few have flirted with acting too, and could perhaps be persuaded to take on a similar project as performers. That might be even more entertaining than having them write plays, since as someone pointed out, you actually need training to act without making a fool of yourself.

So can anyone write? As an editor, I'd have to say no. But perhaps anyone capable of filing a few hundred words on someone else's play in an evening can also manage their own ten-minute play in a day. Of course critics aren't in the habit of reviewing ten-minute plays, but that isn't the point. We judge critics by their criticism, and anything else is a bonus.

Dolan Cummings is the editor of Culture Wars, and has never written a play.