The Guardian view on theatre intervals: a moveable feast | Editorial

From Glyndebourne’s 90-minute picnic breaks to 20-minute queues for a loo in some of the UK’s more historic theatres, the interval has long been part of the tradition of live performance, offering audiences a refuelling stop, while providing hard-pressed venues with extra income. So the decision to do away with one is never lightly taken.

Yet a flurry of high-profile productions have elected to do so, ranging from the edgy Slave Play and The Years , in London, to the 9/11 musical crowd-pleaser Come From Away , which is currently touring the UK. These are not the hour-long staples of the festival circuit, but shows of considerably more than the 75 minutes that is traditionally considered to be the staying power of the “Broadway bladder”.

The fact that Come From Away was a Broadway award-winner back in 2017, while Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play debuted in 2018, underscores that this is not simply a post-Covid phenomenon, reflecting a continuing audience anxiety about crowded spaces, though that may, of course, be a contributory factor. The performance arts have always been a negotiation with circumstance: the theatre interval only came into existence when the move into playhouses meant keeping candles alight.

Film, too, has had an on-off relationship with the interval. So there is an intriguing synchronicity in the fact that theatres including the Globe – the custodian of heritage Shakespeare – have been experimenting with dispensing with intervals just as some cinemas have been toying with reintroducing them, in response to the growing length of the films that they screen. Gone are the days when most of the best movies would clock in at around 90 minutes.

The Vue chain of cinemas in the UK was one of several around the world that scheduled breaks in screenings of Martin Scorsese’s 206-minute epic Killers of the Flower Moon last year. An attempt to do so in the US ended when the film’s producers and distributors objected that it was an infringement of Scorsese’s artistic vision. The maestro himself did not weigh in directly. But he did tell India’s Hindustan Times: “People say it’s three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours.”

Though for every Killers of the Flower Moon there’s a bloated Avatar: The Way of Water , Scorsese has a point. Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (Part 2) were also more than three hours long. Nobody would question their directors’ right to make them like that. In defending the length of his film, Scorsese specifically referenced the 3.5-hour licence regularly given to plays: “There are real actors on stage. You can’t get up and walk around. You give it that respect. Give cinema some respect.”

An interesting test of Scorsese’s parallel comes with the growing popularity, and post-Covid sophistication, of screened stage productions, such as the National Theatre’s NT Live programme. These follow the vision of the original show, including whether or not it was intended to have an interval. So August’s offering of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter , from the Old Vic, includes one, while next month’s Prima Facie , starring Jodie Comer, will not.

The economics of survival mean the interval will not disappear any time soon in theatre and is likely to make more cinema comebacks. But, in today’s market-driven culture, it is heartening to see that artistic vision still has a place in the driving seat.