In interviews over the past decade, Michael Frayn has regularly suggested that he may be about to retire from writing plays or novels or both. But, at 81, he has published a book that ingeniously extends and entwines his lines of work for stage and page.
Matchbox Theatre, charmingly packaged by Faber in a slipcase designed to look like a matchbox, consists of 30 brief scenes, usually for one or two speakers. Almost all dispense with the character names that are normally set down the left side of play texts and are simply printed as dialogue or monologue in the way that they would be in a novel, though without any “he said” or “she said”. Exactly halfway through, there’s a little chapter called Interval, in which alternating lines of italic type have a discussion about where we are:
– So we’re in a book?
– For the moment. Or a theatre, of course. Or neither. Or both. It’s that kind of thing.
In both his most popular play (the backstage farce Noises Off, 1982) and his least popular (Look, Look, 1990, a surrealistic piece set in an auditorium), Frayn played with the physical comedy and philosophical oddity of people watching people pretending to be other people. Matchbox Theatre continues this strain of reflections, and arguably at the deepest level, as it is left to readers to decide if these are play texts or short stories.
Two of the chapters – including Outside Story, in which Shakespearean plots are told as live news reports – have previously been printed, while another pair was included in a production of Frayn’s 1998 sketch show Alarms and Excursions. But this still means that we are being given 26 new plays – or reads – from one of our finest writers.
They are probably best regarded as short dramas to be read, which means that the book resurrects an old theatrical tradition – especially in Scandinavia – of theatrical scripts, such as Ibsen’s, being released first as publications rather than productions. Also, if Frayn really is retiring this time, the project lends a neatness to his CV: like his hero and frequent “collaborator” Chekhov (all of whose major stage works he has translated), he wrote short sketches early on and has never entirely lost the habit.
The scenarios that Frayn stages for readers of Matchbox Theatre include Street Scene, in which a theatre director, leaving rehearsals, becomes irritated that the action on the street outside lacks motivation and realism, and Precisely So, in which two pedantic mathematicians try to get each other’s number.
Another of the sketches, A Stiff Drink, has the feel of Harold Pinter’s One for the Road, a horrifying conversation between a torturer and his victim, transferred from a police state to a suburban cocktail party. And that would be appropriate because, in the genre of the short play, Pinter’s 1984 text has a strong claim to be among the best.
Compared with some of Frayn’s new pieces, One for the Road is quite a long play, running for about 40 minutes, although another Pinter contribution to the sawn-off form, Mountain Language (1988), is over in 25.
That play, in common with One for the Road, involves vicious interrogations in an unnamed war zone, and there seems to be something about dystopian dialogues that suits a duration of just either side of half an hour. Caryl Churchill’s 40-minute play Far Away (2000) has just been revived at the Young Vic in London and also features threatening and treacherous discussions in a fictional dictatorship.
Churchill’s play, like the two Pinters, feels packed with power and meaning despite its compaction, and I think the reasons that tyrannical terror is so suited to the theatre of brevity are that the central situation (the breaking of a human will) is hard to endure for long, and that plays about the abuse of power are most resonant if the location and system remain as loosely universal as possible.
Frayn’s A Stiff Drink, like most of the works in Matchbox Theatre, would occupy about 10 minutes of stage time, which is still on a Shakespearean scale in comparison with the shortest examples of the short form.
Tweeting introduced a tempting new template to short drama: the Scottish dramatist David Greig, for instance, starting The Yes/No Plays which, in the run-up to the Scottish referendum, offerered 140-character conversations between two characters on either side of the divide.
Pre-Twitter, in The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett, a volume of 467 pages, his final 13 plays fill only 98 well-spaced sides, as the writer dwindled into silence. And, as I mentioned in a recent piece about Edward Albee, the American dramatist contends with Beckett for the theatrical brevity record: Albee’s Knock! Knock! Who’s There? (2003) is a monologue of only eight lines, spoken by a character who has been locked for eternity in a cupboard and who turns out to be a theatre critic. So it would be possible to stage a double bill of Beckett and Albee plays that was over in two minutes.
Clearly, ticket pricing for such an evening would be difficult. The main opposition to short plays comes from producers who fear that theatre-goers would be dissatisfied with dramatic snacks rather than a full meal. Although, as the characters in Frayn’s Interval chapter point out, one advantage of being at a theoretical theatre is that they don’t have to queue for a glass of wine or the loo and this also applies to the reader at home. But it would seem remiss if no theatre producer soon shapes an evening from the texts in Matchbox Theatre – a sort of Alarms and Excursions 2 – with Interval perhaps being staged just before the real one or perhaps even in the bar during it.
For the moment, though, one of the few authors to have had huge success with both theatrical and novelistic fictions has combined the best of both in a lovely book that deserves to have many Christmas Day openings this year.
