By my estimation, the first nine speeches of Mamet’s Duck Variations consume 23 words, whereas the first nine speeches of Shaw’s Arms and the Man weigh in at 296 words. Compare the terse David Mamet to the long-winded George Bernard Shaw. All the performance issues over which the writer has no control.Īverage speech length can cause major variations in estimated run time.Style (a one-minute Beckett pause should consume a full page).The packing of the type face (monospaced fonts like Courier will occupy much more space than a highly-packed proportional font like Times New Roman).Line spacing (single spacing? double spacing? single spacing within a speech and double spacing between speeches?).The size of the paper (US Letter paper, used in North America is a different size from A4, used in most of the rest of the world).The run time of a page of a play depends on:. See, for example ‘ Was Solzhenitsyn a Synesthete?‘). They don’t (and, in my opinion, they should not – a play should be written in whatever format works best for the writer. The basic flaw in this is that it assumes that everyone uses a standard page layout. The most common way of estimating is Page Count, with the usual approximation being one minute per page. So what’s the best approximation? Page Count Estimates of stage time will be approximate. Secondly, style make a lot of difference to run time for example, compare Samuel Beckett’s lengthy pauses to the manic pace of a Ray Cooney farce. Firstly, some aspects of timing are outside the writer’s control: stage business, scene changes and slickness of production. The bad news is that it won’t be perfect. The good news is that you can make an estimate. Does it fill an evening’s entertainment? Does the length justify the effort of constructing the set? Will it fit within the time limits allowed by a competition? From that viewpoint, some way of estimating the length will be useful.Īt this point, I have good news and bad news. To someone selecting a play, however, the run time matters. The perfect play might last three minutes or three hours. At one level, that doesn’t matter: the ideal length for your play is the time it takes for you to say what you want to say. So you’ve written your play, now you want to know if it’s the right length.
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