Playwright David Eldridge attacks critic Michael Billington’s complaint that contemporary plays are lacking in imagination and too tied to a 90-minute formula. “For the most part Billington’s thesis is shot through with an ignorance of the modern playwriting culture that is breathtaking for someone who goes to the theatre as much as he does, and belies a backward-looking agenda that bears as little relevance to a 21st-century theatre as John Major’s whimsical fantasy of re-creating the 1950s with warm beer and cricket on the village green.”