Month: August 2022

yesSamuel 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 Theater 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 favorite playwrights, Aeschylus and Euripides, but where he takes the underworld as his setting of him, 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 favorite 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 instill 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 punisher and the Gaieties have always been characterized by a total independence of thought.”

What is fascinating is the umbilical link between theater 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 defense 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 GCSEs – 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 defense. I see Beckett as a man with a foil and Pinter as a man with a saber.”

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.

The first song I remember hearing
I had to call my mum, and she says the first song she remembers me reacting and moving to was The Tears of a Clown by Smokey Robinson.

The first single I bought
A seven-inch single of Push It by Salt-N-Pepa, aged five or six, from a car boot sale in Shepherd’s Bush, that came with a foldout poster. It’s regarded as a classic rap, but it’s actually a dance song – there are only two or three little raps and the rest is just instrumental. It’s all about the bassline and the sample.

The song I do at karaoke
Regulate by Warren G and Nate Dogg, because I can do the voices really easily. Nate Dogg sings a bit like me, and Warren G is a bit more raspy.

The song I inexplicably know every lyric to
I was a massive fan of the Wu-Tang Clan at secondary school. There was this huge buzz around their second album, Wu-Tang Forever. I was a little geek, and rubbish at sport, so I just listened to Triumph, which has every member rapping back to back, so I could perform it in the playground.

The best song to play at a party
Millionaire by Kelis ft André 3000 gets everyone on the dancefloor. I’ve seen it at weddings; I’ve seen it in clubs. When my DJ sticks it on before I come on, everyone goes crazy.

The song I streamed last
I’ve been aware of Jack Harlow for about 10 years but his new album, Come Home the Kids Miss You, is amazing. First Class is probably the weakest rap performance on the album, but the production is so incredible, you can just listen to it on repeat.

The song I can no longer listen to
My four-year-old has just discovered Axel F by Crazy Frog and won’t stop playing it. I was also the biggest Michael Jackson fan, but I also found it hard to listen to him since the Leaving Neverland documentary. Pretty Young Thing was probably my favorite song of all the time, but now I can’t listen to it, and that makes me quite sad.

The best song to have sex to
Live from Joshua Tree by Australian band Rüfüs Du Sol is about an hour long – perfect to have a long sex session to.

The song I wish I had written
A lot of the songs I wish I’d written are all by Arctic Monkeys. You can tell Alex Turner is a fan of rap because he sings with the same playful percussive wordplay as rappers do. The pop culture references and the way he talks about everyday life on Fluorescent Adolescent is genius. He’s the greatest of his generation of him.

The song that changed my life
My song Kickstarts was a real gamechanger. It meant I could pay off my debts, play in other countries, and my gig fees probably went up tenfold, even though it only got to No 3 because it came out during the 2010 World Cup. Wherever I perform it, people know it.

The song that gets me up in the morning
The new Swedish House Mafia album, Paradise Again, didn’t really create the storm it was meant to. But if I was a heavyweight boxer, It Gets Better – somewhere between Justice and Chemical Brothers – would be my ring walk song.

The song I want played at my funeral
One of my favorite films is Casino. It ends with a montage of Sharon Stone dying from an overdose and Joe Pesci getting baseball-batted to death, to the sound of House of the Rising Sun by the Animals. It makes you think of the good times and the bad.

Example’s new album We May Grow Old But We Never Grow Up is out now.