Interesting times

Anthony Neilson, a playwright who never bores, has now revealed to his fellow playwrights how they too can avoid this audience-repelling sin: write a good story, and don't indulge in extraneous stylistic innovations like flowery language or convoluted narrative structure. And don't forget to include a few songs.

Neilson must be right. Surprisingly few of the great playwrights ever sat down to write with the thought: "right, let's make this one so dull, that even my most avid fans will fall asleep in the stalls. I'm going to destroy the audience for live theatre in this country as we know it!" The brains behind We Will Rock You, on the other hand, set out to entertain people, preferably a lot of people, and that's exactly what the show does year on year, night after night, with never a whiff of worthy theatre-going about it.

But is We Will Rock You an exception rather than a rule? Surely it's only successful because of the Queen songs it is based on, rather than its own highly original tale (a narrative that involves the Seven Seas of Rhye and somebody called Galileo). There have been other successes built to the same formula - Mamma Mia being a current example. But assume for the moment that I don't want to write a musical called Fancy a Fight?, about Mancunian brothers who form a band, then roll with it while casting no shadow, etc. Is there anything else I need to know about the crafty art of playmaking, other than that a nation benighted by pubs and DVDs can be lured back into the theatre by the promise of a ripping yarn and some toe-tapping tunes?

Surely people write the sort of plays that really get Neilson's goat - dull pseudo-dramas about Bush or Blair or racism or whatever happens to be newsworthy - because they lack the craftsmanship or good sense to raise these issues in any way other than a direct one. The same goes for overly poetic dramas; writers mistake obscurity for profundity and find it surprisingly hard to write clearly.

Is finding your ideal running time all there is to it? Is technique always a stultifying preoccupation even when it's not about overwrought diction or convoluted plotting? If "narrative clarity is key to the classics' longevity", can Neilson tell us anything about the nuts and bolts that hold those old favourites together? In other words: hint taken, now what?

Actually, I'm not picky about who dispenses this advice, if Anthony Neilson's said all he wishes to say on the matter. These are questions for handbooks and creative writing courses, but they might also be asked in the light of Neilson's remarks on what entertainment is. The verb "to entertain", he says, doesn't just mean distracting the audience for a while, but finding ways "to stimulate, to refresh, to engage them". That is, theatre has the scope for a rich form of entertainment that goes beyond the accessible level of a "profound simplicity": "It's not necessary that every audience member gets every level on which a play works (several, if it's good), but it's important that they've understood it".

I suspect it's more difficult for the writer, let alone the audience, to access these extra levels than Neilson lets on. But I also wonder if this complexity is exactly what sets theatre apart - and means that it can never be as popular as Grand Theft Auto or a night down the pub. No matter how good the story.