Some of the best plays staged this past year lacked an interval - that period when small-talk is possible over a drink among acquaintances who meet, often by pleasant coincidence, and review likely outcomes in the second-half of the drama.
These days, many plays have just three or four characters; are tightly written; and end by 9.40pm, so that viewers can get home for an early night's sleep before rising at the crack of dawn.
When God made "tiger time", so it seems, he didn't make enough of it.
Most of our ancestors survived without ever using a clock. When the playwright JM Synge arrived on Inis Meáin in 1898, he brought the first alarm clock, prompting a local to remark that "no two cocks could equal it".
Before that, the understanding of time depended on shadows cast by the sun through open doors. There wasn't even a sundial in the place. The islanders, who ate only at sun-up and sun-down, spoke long, colourful sentences, feeling no pressure to deliver graphic, rapid-fire points. They had all the time in the world.
Synge thought that they were quite unlike the emerging middle-class, which measured everything in time-and-motion studies, designed to ensure absolute efficiency - a class which was, in consequence, forever running late after a vanishing bus.
In the old days, people thought of time as tied to sun, tides and seasons, in a structure that was more cyclical than linear.
Their poets could imagine conversations across time between Virgil and Dante, Cuchulain and Dan O'Connell. No major distinction was made between past and present, because persons thought of themselves as living according to recurring natural rhythms, in a sort of "eternal now".
The past was not really a different country then, for the same things had been done in much the same way over long centuries.
Though vulnerable to disease and early death, our ancestors felt themselves to be more in control of time than we do. They felt that they were moving through time rather than being moved by it.
It was in the 19th century that such mythical thinking gave way to a historical sense; and people became aware of "public memory" as a chronology unrolled over time. Until then, only elite families and learned men produced archives, biographies and genealogies. For most persons in earlier centuries, a life was assumed to be an accumulation of facts: the self of a writer and the past self he or she reported were assumed to be one and the same.
After the Romantic movement of the early 19th century, an awareness grew of the effects of time upon the making of identity. People, increasingly removed by transport and industry from the scenes of their childhood, began to understand that there was a personal as well as a public past. Literature became filled with attempts to recapture that lost time - but poets and novelists from Wordsworth to Proust soon found that memory played many tricks and that the past wasn't so easily recaptured. The new industrial order of clocks created many rebellions against a world in which everything seemed to be parcelled out in tracts of time: eating, working, sleeping. Anarchists dreamed of blowing up the meridian at Greenwich: and James Joyce wrote parts of Ulysses with four watches, each telling a different time, strapped to his arm.
The spread of railways necessitated the standardisation of time through Britain, but for some years Ireland remained 20 mean minutes behind Greenwich Mean Time (leading to some audacious betting scams by the use of telegraphic information on results of horseraces already run). When GMT was imposed here, some traditional priests insisted on saying their Masses to the "old time" and were supported by droves of parishioners in this revolt.
"Progress" had to win out and now we all rise to the alarm-bell. But we still dream, like Joyce and those parish priests, of bending or breaking the chronological sequence.
Even technology can be used in that attempt. We press the "record" button to capture TV programmes which we cannot immediately watch. As slaves of linear time, we love movies which take us "back to the future", restoring to some past moment the openness it once had, before later events took on the look of inevitability.
Every night, when we remove our watches to ensure deeper sleep, we make an act of homage to the mythic, dream-time of ancestors, before the bourgeois world of perpetual assessment began. There was, after all, a time when there was so much time that nobody bothered to measure it. Now, time rules all - even the shape of our foremost modern plays in those free spaces called theatres - with the result that there never seems to be quite enough of it.