How long should theatre last? | Andrew Dickson

As quick as a gesture, as long as an eternity? While a play can go on for hours, some of the most memorable theatre happens in the blink of an eye

Forget that piece of string. How long is a piece of theatre? An act? A scene? A soliloquy? Aristotle reckoned you had to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Peter Brook, with the kind of chutzpah it's still possible to admire 40 years on, suggested it might be as straightforward as asking a man to cross an empty space while someone else watches. (Something, it has to be said, that sounds significantly more dramatic than his latest play, but that's another story.)

I wonder. I was wondering on Saturday night when I was at a theatre event in a converted warehouse just behind the Arcola theatre in east London. It was rather seductively entitled Live Art Speed Date, but in the end – phew – there was rather more in the way of live art than speed dating, for all that it had a Valentine's theme. Though the whole shebang was pleasingly anarchic – one of the first things you saw when you walked in was people gyrating to the DJ in orang-utan costumes – the timetable was strict. You got yourself issued with a number and a map, acquired an envelope telling you your timetable, and marched between mysterious appointments with artists sitting at tables, behind desks and in private booths. Over the course of three hours I clocked up a bewildering array of assignations: a private duet with a xylophone-wielding Elvis fan; a waltz with a dancer and her tame Italian violinist; a text conversation with a couple auditioning their new flatmate; a personal performance of a piece bravely scored for bass guitar, trumpet and homemade theremin.

This wasn't an event, such as Ontroerend Goed's Internal, meant to make you ponder deeply on the pleasures and perils of encountering a stranger one-on-one – no obvious setup; no anxious, faintly illicit collision between hope and desire. Instead, these were more like games: literally so in the case of the football obsessive (wearing her boyfriend's strip, apparently) who tried to persuade me into a game of adapted keepie-uppie. Some of the shows worked better than others. The one constant was time: an announcer gave us a countdown to start, a klaxon-blast to finish. Four minutes each. The time it takes to boil a kettle, or toast a couple of slices of bread.

I confess to being a great believer in theatre happening fast: for all that Tynan wrote somewhere that all great art contains an element of boredom (annoyingly, I can't find it today – anyone?), surely there's no quicker way to lose an audience than making them conscious of things they'd rather be doing. A play may take hours, but theatre surely happens in moments as tiny as a glance, a word or a gesture. Something as small as an embrace; something as big as a murder. If they're done well, those moments make long hours spent at the theatre worthwhile. So I guess I went in looking for the self-enclosed miniature, the beautiful four-minute riddle, the haiku-like piece with all the concision of a Raymond Carver short story or a finely tuned pop song.

In fact, in this feast of fragments, the pieces that lingered – well, wanted to. One was a conversation with an artist cheerfully offering herself as a temporary muse. She steadfastly refused to perform until I'd revealed something I hadn't told anyone else – which, to my surprise, I did. It opened into a discussion far larger than four minutes would allow, as good a demonstration as any of theatre's curious ability to open up truths that otherwise remain untouched. But the one that has really stuck was performed by artist Tiffany Charrington, who offered a speeded-up version of an art project called I Shall See Your Houses, which (at least in its abbreviated form) featured recordings of people talking, simply but movingly, about home. It was an attempt to live out what a French thinker I'd long forgotten about, Gaston Bachelard, called the poetics of space. As the voices unspooled over headphones, Charrington placed a series of tiny model houses on the table between us: a small ritual, delicate and somehow rather beautiful. But the best bit concerns the envelope she presented as I left, which it's now up to me to fill in with my own thoughts on home, so that the chain of recorded memories can continue – who knows, for ever. Best of all: I can take my time.

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Does theatre have any value? Well, it depends … | Chris Wilkinson

As a recent debate at the ICA revealed, the real value of art lies in its capacity to be contradictory – even agonisingly boring

"What is the value of art?" That was the question Tom Morris asked his audience at a talk he gave last Saturday as part of the London international mime festival. It is a question which he has been mulling over for many years, and in order to answer it, he asked all of us to close our eyes and focus on one piece of artwork that had had a significant impact on us.

As we each remembered a particular sculpture, song or play, Morris asked a series of further questions: "was it simple or complicated? Did it feel private or public? Did it change you?" And so on.

After this he asked us to feedback on what we had discovered about those works of art that made them feel special. For some, art had provided them with a moment of "transcendence" or of "emotional purity". For others, the work had articulated perfectly a feeling or an idea they already had: as Alexander Pope put it, "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed".

All of these responses make sense and are good reasons for valuing art. But for me, the answer to this question lies elsewhere. When I closed my eyes, the thing that immediately popped into my head was the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch. Given the enormous success the show enjoyed, this was hardly an original idea. But what surprised me, as I listened to Morris's questions and thought about the show, was that I realised it had affected me in a way I had not noticed before.

When I was a child, my parents would take me, every year, to see the Royal Tournament – a large military tattoo held at Earls Court in London. I have vivid recollections of these militaristic jamborees, and I realised that Black Watch, which itself takes the form of a tattoo, is now, in my mind, intimately linked to and subversive of these memories. So, for me, the experience of watching the show was both public and communal, but also private and individual.

And it is this capacity to be two contradictory things at once that I think gives great art its real value. So much of what I have seen that has really affected me has revelled in the pleasure of paradox. For instance, the very space that Morris was speaking in at the ICA was the same theatre where I had first seen Forced Entertainment perform when I was a sixth former back in 1997. Their show, Pleasure, had a formative impact on me. As a performance, it was slow – agonizingly, stupefyingly, slow – the show seemed to rejoice in its capacity to be boring. And yet it was because it was so "boring" that I ended up finding it so thoroughly absorbing and interesting.

To take another example, the only time I have ever been truly overwhelmed emotionally by a piece of visual art was when I saw Michelangelo's David for the first time. I was astonished by the sculpture's beauty – a perfect depiction of the perfect male form. But the more I looked at it the more I realised it was ludicrously out of proportion, with hands and feet that were far too large for the body. It was an image that was both true and false at the same time. And surely this paradox is inherent in any work of art – after all, we know that the characters on stage are merely actors and that David is just a lump of marble.

Perhaps the artistic importance of these contradictions is why I, like Anthony Nielson, feel so suspicious whenever I hear someone claim that a play should have a "thesis" or an argument. Polemic works well on the two dimensions of the newspaper page, but in the three dimensional world of the stage it can end up feeling hollow. And if paradox is the lifeblood of the theatre, then perhaps we can answer the question "to be or not to be?" with the statement "to be and not to be".

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