There are appetising theatrical events promised for the weeks ahead: a new play about the suffragettes by the fast-rising Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the bug-eyed David Tennant as Hamlet at Stratford and, for those with swashbuckling tendencies, a musical called Zorro. But let's not overlook a little-advertised revival that's getting a sporadic series of performances at 6pm at the National Theatre from July 21.

Pinter's A Slight Ache should last little more than 40 minutes, but, with Simon Russell Beale and Clare Higgins as the edgy couple at its centre, it's likely to exercise our mental muscles more than most plays three times its length.

I won't call A Slight Ache a playlet, because I once described one of Pinter's later pieces as that, provoking the dramatist to write a pained letter to The Times declaring that even though it was short it was still a play. And he was quite right. Some of our finest dramatists, Pinter among them, have found subtlety, richness, depth and, yes, size in the one-act form. To equate length with quality is to prefer a big dish of sausage and mash to a small one of smoked salmon - or We Will Rock You to A Slight Ache or those exquisite laments for wasted lives, Beckett's Not I and That Time.

So why do we seldom see short plays unless some resourceful impresario has jammed them into a double or triple bill, giving us a full-length evening? This recently happened with a West End pairing of Pinter's The Collection and The Lover and with the clutch of obscure Beckett plays that Peter Brook brought from Paris to London. That's to be welcomed, but is too rare a phenomenon to provide an answer to the neglect of good one-acters. Why can't theatres regularly do what the National is doing with A Slight Ache and the Royal Court did when it cast Pinter himself as the growling depressive spooling through old recordings of his life in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape - find early-evening or late-night slots for work whose only fault is to refuse to go on and on?

Come to that, what's happened to lunchtime plays? In the 1970s they sprouted all over London, often offering the cultural counterparts of meaty midday sandwiches. Now you'll find one or two at the enterprising little King's Head in Islington but few elsewhere. And all this is a pity not just for audiences and playwrights, who have no incentive to treat subjects that demand relative brevity, but for theatres and, indeed, actors.

I'll never forget seeing Peggy Ashcroft as a distraught mother and Michael Kitchen as her wayward son at the National in a platform performance of Pinter's Family Voices, a radio play that more than merited its jump to the stage. Wouldn't many of today's leading actors welcome parallel opportunities to add to their own repertoire and a needy playhouse's coffers?

It's not as if quick-fire work hasn't a history. Dramatists from Sheridan to Chekhov, Yeats to Lorca are among those whose one-acters would bear revival. Back in the 19th century short plays were regularly staged as curtain-raisers or provided after-dinner entertainment in great houses. In 1851 Dickens played a lovelorn barrister called Gabblewig in one of his own comic plays, Mr Nightingale's Diary, before Queen Victoria.

Maybe his dramatic work, which was mostly short and funny, would bear revisiting, maybe not. One-act slots provide an opportunity for try-outs on the cheap.

True, nobody in their senses would stage Shaw's silly, self-serving Shak Versus Shav (“Couldst write Macbeth?” asks the Bard; “No need,” replies Shaw. “It has been bettered by Walter Scott's Rob Roy. Behold and blush!”). But it would be terrific to see The Man of Destiny, his attempt to rescue Napoleon from romantic tradition. Likewise with O'Neill's dark portrait of early-morning life in a seedy hotel, Hughie; Synge's Shadow of the Glen, which involves a young woman's escape from the old husband she wrongly believes dead; Stanley Houghton's comic treatment of much the same idea in The Dear Departed; Joe Orton's wickedly subversive Funeral Games; Tom Stoppard's A Separate Peace, an unwontedly serious play about a man who finds refuge from the world by faking illness; Enda Walsh's Chatroom, a masterly one-acter about the cyber-bullying of a suicidal boy - and scores of others.

But maybe change is in the air. A pair of John Mortimer's judicial comedies, with Edward Fox as an inept barrister and then a paranoid judge, recently hit the West End, and could well have become separate revivals. Chichester went farther, staging several short Coward plays and proving that Family Album, about a solemn wake that becomes an infantile revel, deserved its own slot. And then there's the example of the National, which has been filling the Lyttelton with Corin Redgrave's solo performances of Wilde's De Profundis and plans to add Pinter's melancholy, touching two-hander Landscape to A Slight Ache this autumn. Perhaps there's a future for good short plays after all.

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