Small talk

What’s going on? Everyone’s doing playlets all of a sudden. I saw five this week. The Donmar is presenting a trio of scripts by Robert Holman entitled Making Noise Quietly. A silly title. ‘A writers’ writer’ — an even sillier cliché — is how the programme notes describe Holman. If they mean ‘a boring writer’ they should say so. His first play shows us two teenage pacifists meeting in the countryside during the closing months of the war. One is openly gay, the other is still hunting for the closet door. They chat. They flirt rather innocently. Then they strip off and sunbathe. That’s all that happens.

Plays like this, static and plotless, take enormous risks with the audience’s patience. To engage the crowd with earnest, high-minded chitchat is quite a challenge but this play succeeds because the lads’ conversation throbs and hums with internal tensions as they explore each other’s emotional background.