Post by joem on Jul 8, 2023 21:42:52 GMT
I was really looking forward to seeing this, Pinter and Beckett together on stage - what's not to like??? Add the intriguing configuration that Pinter was a keen amateur cricketer and Beckett actually played first-class (this is a fact not an adjective) cricket and you wonder what they'd get up to with a bowl or bat.
The truth is... not that much really. This play by Shomit Dutta overflows with admiration for the two twentieth century giants and with love for cricket as well. But unfortunately homage though it might be it is very slight - absurdist in nature - and relies on the audience's knowledge of cricket and the two playwrights' work for laughs in order to work. Without this knowledge the play will pass over your head with a few laughs, yes, but it could really be anyone on stage. Laurel and Hardy. Darby and Joan. Vladimir and Estragon.
Such plot as there is, which unwinds after the cricket game, consists of a mixture of Waiting for Godot and The Dumb Waiter with references to other works by the terrible twosome (Krapp's Last Tape, The Caretaker) to raise a knowing laugh or smile. Less pertinently Edward Thomas - not a playwright, a poet from a much earlier generation, and of unknown aficionadoness to cricket - is brought in by setting the second part of the (one-act) play in Adlestrop the eponymous railway station of his best-known poem - and the poem quoted in case we missed the reference.....
This is not a bad play, it's a clever play in many ways. But it's clever in a self-conscious way, relishing its cleverness at the expense of all other considerations. Like writing-by-numbers or for a thesis.
Stephen Tompkinson and Andrew Lancel (as Beckett and Pinter) work well together and catch something of the writers' characters, at least insofar as their public personae, and the setting - cricket pavilion then railway station is economic and effective. But if you crave cricketing excitement I think the current Ashes series offers stronger fare.
The truth is... not that much really. This play by Shomit Dutta overflows with admiration for the two twentieth century giants and with love for cricket as well. But unfortunately homage though it might be it is very slight - absurdist in nature - and relies on the audience's knowledge of cricket and the two playwrights' work for laughs in order to work. Without this knowledge the play will pass over your head with a few laughs, yes, but it could really be anyone on stage. Laurel and Hardy. Darby and Joan. Vladimir and Estragon.
Such plot as there is, which unwinds after the cricket game, consists of a mixture of Waiting for Godot and The Dumb Waiter with references to other works by the terrible twosome (Krapp's Last Tape, The Caretaker) to raise a knowing laugh or smile. Less pertinently Edward Thomas - not a playwright, a poet from a much earlier generation, and of unknown aficionadoness to cricket - is brought in by setting the second part of the (one-act) play in Adlestrop the eponymous railway station of his best-known poem - and the poem quoted in case we missed the reference.....
This is not a bad play, it's a clever play in many ways. But it's clever in a self-conscious way, relishing its cleverness at the expense of all other considerations. Like writing-by-numbers or for a thesis.
Stephen Tompkinson and Andrew Lancel (as Beckett and Pinter) work well together and catch something of the writers' characters, at least insofar as their public personae, and the setting - cricket pavilion then railway station is economic and effective. But if you crave cricketing excitement I think the current Ashes series offers stronger fare.