23 – 27 May

Seasoned pub quizzers will know that Samuel Beckett is the only Nobel Prize winner to have played first class cricket. A little less well known is that fellow Nobel laureate Harold Pinter was equally passionate about the game, captaining the Gaieties cricket club with enthusiasm. In Stumped, Shomit Dutta has created a scenario where those two great absurdists find themselves together at a match somewhere in the Cotswolds, preparing to play at five and six in the batting order. The sky is blue, but the match is not going well, and there is tension in the air as they anxiously wait.

‘Waiting’ is the thematic thread that runs through this 70-minute two-hander. The situation of two men waiting for something that may or may not happen clearly echoes Waiting For Godot and The Dumb Waiter, but Dutta casts his net wider, drawing in references to Greek drama, and to R.S. Thomas’s Adlestrop, his poem set in a Cotswold railway station where, very Godot-like, ‘No one left and no one came.’ This might sound like a rather dry display of literary and cricketing know-how, but Stumped is great fun. Dutta’s script is shamelessly pun-packed: when Pinter describes a match set in a nunnery, the game ‘ends not with a bang, but a wimple.’ After the game they wait for a lift to Oxford from a mysterious teammate that may or may not be named ‘Doggo’. That may be somewhat groan-inducing, but elsewhere the wordplay truly sparkles as both playwrights seek to score points off each other.

Beckett is depicted as the more expansive, confident character, noisily exasperated by Pinter’s refusal to pad up in preparation for his innings. When Pinter points out that he is partially prepared, having put on his protective box, Beckett’s disparaging response is, ‘Ah well, we mustn’t neglect the little things.’ Stephen Tompkinson is entirely believable as Beckett, depicting him as a rangy Irish genius with a quicksilver mind, confident of his own intellectual abilities, but never heavy-handed with his cleverness. Andrew Lancel is equally convincing as Pinter; younger, darker, and more contained, hiding his anxieties behind those trademark dark-rimmed glasses. Both performances, perfectly pitched, offer a kind of heightened realism that never descends into mere caricature. Comic heights are reached in a scene where the exasperated Beckett berates the hapless Pinter for his woefully inept three-ball innings, with the team’s star batsman run out without scoring. Off stage a phone repeatedly rings. Who is calling? We never learn and the lift to Oxford never comes …

Stumped will obviously appeal most to those with an interest in cricket and in the plays of Beckett and Pinter. But others may well find much to enjoy, both in the wittiness of the writing and in the actors’ adroit depictions of two giants of literature caught in a tragi-comic existential crisis.

★★★★☆  Mike Whitton,  24 May 2023

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton