How long should theatre last?

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.