Drama at Lord’s: Stumped is a treat for cricket fans

So farewell to cricket’s The Hundred tournament, or what seemed by the end to be beefy South Africans in ‘Butterkist’ shirts belting sixes over cow corner off some fairly inoffensive county seamers. Does anyone remember a single result? Or really have any loyalty? Fine, have it as a marketing exercise to raise a few quid for the game, but there aren’t enough great players. It felt a bit like some upgraded pub cricket – and it’s going to be with us for years.

What could be massively more significant for the game in the long term is over the Atlantic, where the former England star Liam Plunkett is one of many former players attached to a new £100 million plan for a professional T20 league in America next summer, in six big cities. Indian Premier League franchises seem to be getting involved too. And Dallas Daredevils sounds more fun than Welsh Fire.

How long will it be before Test cricket only exists as a fondly remembered ‘Exhibition’ match every couple of years? ‘Really, Grandpa, did you actually play in whites?’

Much better to remember the game with a more cerebral event at Lord’s this weekend. There have always been strong links between theatre and cricket: most acting companies have their own teams and the list of playwrights who loved the game is long and glittering: Terence Rattigan, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Alan Ayckbourn and countless others. And of course Sam Beckett and Harold Pinter, both cricket-obsessed Nobel prize-winners who transformed the nature of modern theatre. Such a shame, I always thought, that cricket wasn’t more on the stage.

But now Shomit Dutta, a playwright, classics teacher and noted opening batsman for Pinter’s own team the Gaieties, has put that right with a richly comic drama called Stumped (previously titled Yes... No... Wait – three words very familiar to anyone who has been run out playing club cricket). In the play, which is being performed at and live-streamed from Lord’s this Saturday, Beckett and Pinter, who knew each other, are playing a match in a Cotswold village. Two wickets are down and they are both waiting to bat at five and six, while Beckett, who has his pads on, is doing the scoring, helpfully raising his arm to acknowledge signals from the umpires offstage. An argumentative Pinter finds it tricky to pad up after bruising his ankle earlier while saving a four off Beckett’s bowling.

Like many players in village cricket, they are already worried about getting a lift home afterwards. They chat in witty, densely joke-packed, almost Stoppardian dialogue about Beckett’s place in Wisden – on which Pinter is spectacularly well informed – Shakespeare, tea (of course) and an ongoing Test match as well as that elusive ride home. It is lovely stuff.

In the second act the pair are together again, but the mood is darker, the playwrights are well refreshed (or ‘utterly arseholed’) after their dinner and a lot of whisky, but still waiting for their lift. Though who is the man in the winter coat? And how did Beckett get that gash in his head? And who was run out so disastrously?

The play is a treat, exploring, with a deftness of touch that Shane Warne would have admired, the nature of cricket, the theatre and personal rivalries. It is available on demand from the end of September. Do see it if you can.

Sincere apologies to anyone who misguidedly took any notice of this column’s warm endorsement of Emma Raducanu for the US Open. That’s why I simply enjoy tennis and don’t coach it. Still, at least she can at last get in a good block of much-needed training and conditioning. But here’s another prediction: Britain’s Jack Draper should win a major in the next five years. Or is that the commentator’s curse…?