Ninety minutes
I went and saw Ninety at the Ensemble Theatre last night with a friend. They had a spare ticket and so I said yes before I had any idea what I was off to see. Then when I looked it up online I thought, 'oh well, that looks interesting'.

As I wrote on facebook 'I laughed and I cried and I thought - and so I liked it', because to be amused into laughing, moved to weeping and provoked to thinking about something is about as much as I hope for in entertainment. And I did like this play.
The premise is a married couple who have split up and the husband is due to remarry, but the wife asks him for 90 minutes of his time to talk through their own marriage and why he should stay with her instead. What follows is basically that: 90 minutes of this couple talking through their life - with flash backs to earlier scenes - airing their grievances and saying those things that were never said (I do love this sort of stuff!). Obviously it's a play of the world so it contains sexual references, some bad language and the foundation of their whole relationship in the beginning is uninspirational, but the way it unfolds it intriguing (I was hooked for the whole ninety minutes of these two people talking to each other).
I do wish I could read the script, because most of it was said in fairly fast-paced dialogue, so it's not easy to remember any particulars. What was ultimately most surprising was the fact that if the play has any particular line it's towing it's quite pro-marriage (or pro sticking it out with the same person at least). The guy drops the line of just wanting 'to be happy' early in the dialogue, and gets tackled on that, then their is a lot of resistance to the idea that you can up and leave a history and just 'begin again' elsewhere. Without trying to nut out details of what was right and what was wrong all up it's an interesting observation of contemporary marriage and what people think relationships ought to be.
There were scenes that were laugh-out-loud funny - in particular the guy describing, in all earnestness, the desperation he felt at being left at home on his own for a week with their baby. Then at the end came a scene that had the tears running off my face and if it had gone on for two seconds longer it would have been more than tears. What you learn is that their little girl died, and that the husband's inability to deal with that was the beginning of the end. So eventually he tries to talk about it during this meeting - of his envy that his wife could articulate what she felt and make anniversaries and do something with her grief and he never could - and it's wrenching to watch.
The actors Kate Raison and Brian Meegan are married in real life (I didn't know that till afterwards) and I am no play-frequenter, but I thought the acting was very good, especially Brian Meegan for his difficult scenes.
I liked it.