An Irishman's Diary

I WENT to see The Weirat the Gate the other night, and very good it was too. Garry Hynes has moved Conor McPherson's 1997 play back a few years to just before the boom. So the "small rural bar" in which it is set looks even more remote now than was originally intended.

In this lost Ireland, the characters smoke indoors. A woman ordering wine causes the barman to panic. "Germans" are the only foreigners in the country. And of course nobody has a mobile phone yet.

This last illusion was completed by the fact that, the night I went, not a single bleep - never mind a ring-tone - occurred in the auditorium. Gate audiences are well house-trained, no doubt. Even so, it was impressive.

For myself, I must admit to suffering a short bout of that 21st-century syndrome — mobile phone anxiety — during the course of the evening. The condition typically strikes during the climax of a film, play, or speech, when the audience becomes hushed, and even the coughing and fidgeting stops completely.

Then, because you only switched your phone to "silent" earlier, rather than turning it off altogether as asked, the possibility that you pressed the wrong command, or that the phone has somehow reactivated itself out of badness, starts gnawing your stomach. When that happens, the fact that you checked it twice already is of absolutely no comfort.

There was such a moment in The Weir, when the sole actress on stage divulged her tragic secret and the theatre became so quiet you could have heard a ring-tine composed of pins dropping. Suddenly I had an intense need to check my phone again. But even to do that much would have been crass, involving physical movements and rustling, however minute. Audience members might be distracted. So might the actress.

Worse, by merely by having to triple-check that your phone was off, you would reveal yourself to be the sort of low-life careless enough to forget in the first place. And you know you didn't forget, so that would be an injustice.

Instead, you sit the moment out. But it's an exquisitely uncomfortable feeling - the same one you get when you've been driving on the empty fuel sign for the last 47 miles, and suddenly you're stopped at an uphill junction during rush-hour traffic on a wet Friday bank holiday and you know that if the petrol runs out now, your case will feature on the AA Roadwatchbulletins.

A BIG part of the reason there were no phones bleeping at the Gate - audience sophistication aside - was that the play did not have an interval.

As any theatre manager will tell you, most people do turn phones off at the start. Then the break comes. They ring the baby-sitter to check if everything's OK, down a triple Bushmills to celebrate the news that it is, and saunter back into the auditorium, utterly relaxed but carrying a time-bomb, now ticking towards social death.

This is one problem a play without an interval avoids. Unwanted disruption of the action is another. Having suspended its disbelief in Act 1 - or so the producers hope - the audience is not allowed to regroup until the production is safely over.

At an hour and 40 minutes, The Weirseems a reasonable compromise: long enough to weave theatrical magic and short enough for most of the audience to survive without a toilet break. But the absence of an interval can make for a slightly tense situation. And nobody is more tense, I imagine, than a theatre's accountants.

I read a few years ago about a season at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on- Avon, in which both Julius Caesar(main stage) and Macbeth(side stage) were presented without intervals. For the 11-week run, the lost catering revenue was put at £120,000 for Julius Caesarand £45,000 for Macbeth.

The Gate's losses are probably much more modest (my inquiries proved fruitless). Even so, Michael Colgan's theatre is often portrayed as a relentlessly commercial operation. So its wanton bohemianism in dispensing with an interval should be acknowledged.

Intervals are a relatively modern development in the theatre. Shakespeare didn't know of such things, apparently. Even the division of his plays into acts may only have evolved to facilitate the changing of candles.

The provision of toilets - now the main non-commercial reason for having breaks - is a recent fad too. There is reason to believe that, in early Victorian times, people occupying boxes at the theatre brought chamber pots with them. They kept them in their drawing-rooms, after all.

But stamina was still a virtue then and even in the late 1800s - when things had changed so much that G.B. Shaw complained about the four or five intervals that had become standard in Shakespeare productions. Men took advantage of these to drink and smoke, while their unfortunate women sat bored or stoic in the auditorium (there still being no toilets to queue for).

The fashion for intervals has now settled at one. But audiences are so used to having it that stamina levels have fallen drastically. An uneasy feeling grips you in the Gate at learning that you will be trapped in the auditorium for more than an hour-and-a-half, with no escape. And it's a compliment to the uniformly excellent cast that, unless you drink a large quantity of liquid beforehand, you won't notice the time passing.