Stumped at Hampstead Theatre

The audience faces a backdrop of faded azure, with a framed, doll-house-sized model of a cricket pavilion immediately conjuring the British pastoral whimsy of Shomit Dutta’s Stumped. The play imagines the affectionate relationship between playwrights Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, who are united by a love of lexicon and cricket, their dialogue charmingly characterised by literary and sporting ribbing. Its premiere was recorded at Lord’s cricket ground and live-streamed in September 2022. The Hampstead Theatre currently welcomes a live run.

The compact space and miniature set models create a distorted perspective, in which Stephen Tompinkson’s Beckett and Harold Lancel’s Pinter appear like giants, every foible of gesture and expression accentuated. The pair are dressed in cricket whites, their Tweedledum and Tweedledee duet evoking Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot, and Pinter’s Ben and Gus from The Dumb Waiter. But, like the characters in their most quintessential two-handers, the stumbling duo’s balance of power is not identical. Beckett sports a long grey coat over his flannels and wire-framed glasses; he is the more advanced of the pair, in years, knowledge of classical antiquity and cricket. He remains one run ahead throughout, while Pinter complains of sporting ailments, and nurses his lack of batting success with a reliable supply of whisky.

In tribute to its subjects, Dutta’s droll dialogue is heavily peppered with lexiconic specificity, its humour generated from mundane ridiculousness. “Regular or petit-pois?” asks Beckett of Pinter’s frozen peas. The latter have better distribution of cold but melt more quickly, he explains languidly. They spar over the exactitude of a cup of tea. Beckett requires three sugars, and Pinter questions if they will have teaspoons or cubes, and whether the amounts remain equivalent. Beckett gags when it arrives, spitting out a “tastes like gravy!”

Mark Aspinall’s score provides jazzy clarinet noodles in scene changes, evoking the soundtrack to the introductory animation of a Jeeves and Wooster episode. Yet Stumped fails to provide the searing social commentary that brings enduring meatiness to PG Woodhouse’s magnum opus, and it seems to exist in a somewhat self-indulgent vacuum. Dutta describes the play as a “comic caprice”, but the dialogue doesn’t delve much deeper than an unearthly afternoon of cricket and theatre banter, and feels exclusive to an audience that has substantial existing knowledge of both topics.

The characters frequently reference a mythical batsman called “Doggo”, and a repeated piercing phone call ominously interrupts the persistent chatter. The effect teeters on the cusp of absurdity, a friendly, translucent imitation of the works of two literary greats. Whilst the audience leaves with a familiar feel of the playwrights’ idiosyncratic style of speech and pedantic proclivity for cricket, there is little attention given to the pair’s upbringings, wider work and political beliefs, or a questioning of the relevance of absurdist theatre today. Given how rich this potential was, the otherwise carefully crafted dialogue feels empty, with an audience struggling to remain invested beyond the 70-minute set.

James Graham’s 2021 play The Best of Enemies also imagines the domestic detail of the relationships between influential artistic and political figures (Gore Vidal, William F Buckley, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol) but Graham effectively centres the dialogue in a context of current political discourse, exploring the long-term impact of the original live televised political debate. By contrast, Stumped feels confined to a charming daydream: pleasant, but lacking the pungent impact of Beckett’s over-stewed, strongly-sugared cup of English breakfast.

Ellen Wilkinson
Images: Pamela Raith

Stumped is at Hampstead Theatre from 16^th June until 22^nd July 2023. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.