Cricket and playwrights is a weirdly classic combination, with Beckett, Stoppard and Pinter the most famous amongst many vocal fans of the sport. Nobody has ever actually written a great play about it, though, and that basically holds with this entertaining but flawed diptych of dramas about England’s relationship with India from writer Kate Attwell.
The first half of ‘Testmatch’ is set during a rainy day stoppage at the Women’s World Cup, a one-day match between England and India. In a players’ lounge, three unnamed members of each team are cooling their heels. The English team are notably more stressed: after idly bantering for a bit, a silly debate over the phrase ‘too little, too late’ leads to Bea Svistunenko’s captain smashing her bat up in frustration and storming off.
Attwell is trying to do a lot of things with this short piece, which takes in everything from corruption in the game, to contemporary England’s obliviousness to its legacy in India, to clandestine lesbianism in global majority sports teams.
It’s enjoyable, but it essentially stuffs a full-length play’s-worth of incident into 45 minutes - Svistunenko’s character’s dizzyingly fast need to unburden herself of a dark secret could really have done with another hour or so to make its way to the surface.
Part two is set in colonial Calcutta, at the British East India Company’s headquarters during the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. The tone is much broader and more knockabout – almost a ‘Blackadder’ vibe – with Svistunenko, Haylie Jones and Tanya Katyal all hamming it up as two posh male Company grandees and their long-suffering Indian servant Abhi.
It isn’t exactly about cricket, but cricket is discussed at length, not least because Svistunenko and Jones’s pair of preening panjandrums are locked in a dispute with a group of women from back home over who invented overarm bowling (the technique was indeed thought to have been developed by women wanting to avoid swinging their arms through their large skirts). It’s essentially a satire on colonialism that starts off light and builds to something rather more bleak and damning.
Diane Page’s lively production is never boring, and Attwelll’s text is witty and impressive when it comes to synthesising large anmounts of factual historical information into a larkier fictional narrative. The cast is enjoyable, especially the amusing Katyal, who has the makings of a bona fide star following her excellent recent turn in the RSC’s ‘The Empress’.
But as well as both halves of ‘Testmatch’ feeling overstuffed, it never felt clear to me how they’re supposed to fit with each other. A crossover scene at the end confirms they’re an integrated whole, and not just two cricket-themed plays. But I found it hard to see what they added to each other.
Is corruption in English sports being compared to that of the rapacious East India Company? I mean sure, capitalism is toxic, and greed has long been a feature of the British character. But it’s not a very illuminating comparison really – an invented story of match fixing is not comparable to a famine that killed millions. Nor does the English team’s muddled attitude towards their Indian counterparts feel meaningfully reflected in the appallingly callous behaviour of the East India Company officials. I’m not saying Attwell was actually trying to make the two pieces overtly comment on each other. But it feels like a missed opportunity that they don’t. Two decent innings, but it would have been better to have one great one.
