Batting for Godot: the play about Beckett and
Pinter teaming up for a game of cricket
The two titans of modern drama were both cricket
obsessives. What if they had faced the fast bowlers together? Playwright Shomit
Dutta explains why he made it happen – with darkly comic drama Stumped
Michael
Billington
@billicritic
Mon 8 Aug
2022 08.00 BST
Samuel
Beckett and Harold Pinter had a lot in common. Both changed the way plays are
written and perceived, both were Nobel prize winners and both had a passion for
cricket. That last link is a crucial factor in a new play by Shomit Dutta,
Stumped, which will be streamed live from Lord’s.
Produced by
the Original Theatre Company, it will star Stephen Tompkinson as Beckett and
Andrew Lancel as Pinter, and is described by Dutta as “a caprice, a shared
dream”. Imagine Waiting for Godot crossed with The Dumb Waiter in a cricketing
context and you get the general idea.
Dutta is a
multifaceted figure who has written an original play about the Trojan war and
translated Greek drama, he teaches classics at a London school and is a former
captain of the cricket team, the Gaieties, that was Pinter’s pride and joy. All
the same, I wonder what prompted him to make a play out of two of the most
iconic figures in modern drama.
“The idea
originally came from a fellow Gaieties member, Inigo Thomas, who suggested I
write a sketch to coincide with a Beckett festival in Enniskillen. But during
lockdown in 2020 I decided to turn the sketch into a full-length play, partly
inspired by Aristophanes’ The Frogs. In that play, Aristophanes brings to life
two of his favourite playwrights, Aeschylus and Euripides, but where he takes
the underworld as his setting, I chose a more neutral space. Pinter’s plays are
largely set indoors and Beckett’s in a dystopian landscape so an idyllic
cricket ground, where both men are initially waiting to bat, seemed like a nice
compromise.”
While
Beckett and Pinter were friends, I suggest they were very different in
temperament and technique. Beckett’s plays are bleaker, more abstract,
ultimately more image-based than Pinter’s. “I wouldn’t disagree,” says Dutta.
“Where Pinter’s characters are pugilistic, Beckett’s often seem nostalgic.
Pinter’s characters contest the space between them whereas Beckett’s speak more
in isolation – think of Lucky in Godot or the Mouth in Not I – and are often
uttering into a void. Stalemate seems a word that applies to Beckett whereas
with Pinter there is the possibility of escape. As soon as I say that, I think
of exceptions: look at the end of No Man’s Land, one of my favourite plays,
where the characters seem frozen in time. But I hope my play will bring out the
crucial distinctions between the two writers.”
Dutta had
the advantage of knowing Pinter through the Gaieties, for whom the dramatist
was at various times player, match-manager and chairman. What are his memories
of the writer? “The first non-cricketing remark I made to Harold was that,
since he was wearing a winter coat in May, he looked a bit like Davies in The
Caretaker. I don’t think he took too kindly to that. But, when it came to the
Gaieties, Harold tried to instil a bloody-mindedness and make it clear how
deeply he felt about the club, about cricket and about winning. At the same
time, he wasn’t a castigator and the Gaieties has always been characterised by
a total independence of thought.”
What is
fascinating is the umbilical link between theatre and cricket. Why is it that
not just Beckett and Pinter but legions of dramatists and actors have a passion
for the game? “I suppose,” says Dutta, “that cricket and drama both work
through metaphor. Drama is not mimetic like the 19th-century novel and cricket
similarly gives you something that is and is not reality. The beginning of an
innings is a birth and the end of one – as I know to my cost as a batsman – is
very much like a death. The weather in cricket is a determining factor and is
rather like those mysterious forces you find in Greek tragedy. A batsman or a
bowler also has to be equally capable of defence or attack like a character in
a play – especially in Pinter where words can be a shifting source of evasion
or aggression.”
While Dutta
is driven by a love for cricket and the classics – and he rejoices in the fact
that state-school students are being encouraged to do Latin GCSE – he is also
working on a number of original plays. “I’ve got a project about a meeting
between Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde that took place during Wilde’s first US
tour. I’m also co-writing something about the meeting of two magicians, Jasper
Maskelyne and a German with the stage name Kalanag, whose talents for deception
were deployed by their respective armies in the second world war.” When I point
out that he seems preoccupied by oppositional males Dutta counters that he has
already written a play about Helen of Troy and is working on a Jacobean-style
drama about the painter Artemisia Gentileschi.
But now,
his focus is on Beckett and Pinter and I wonder what he hopes Stumped will
achieve. “There are,” he says, “two potential audiences: cricket-lovers and
those whose prime interest is in theatre. What they will get is a conflict
between two characters who are playwrights, in a situation that can shift
quickly from attack to defence. I see Beckett as a man with a foil and Pinter
as a man with a sabre.”
That takes
me back to The Frogs where there is a contest to decide whether Aeschylus or
Euripides is the weightier playwright. It will be fascinating to see whether
Dutta’s Aristophanic play sparks a similar debate about two indisputable titans
of modern drama.
Stumped is streamed live from Lord’s on 10
September and is available on demand from 27 September
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