Richard Bean’s superb new play The English Game starts unassumingly with a modest expanse of turf, bounded on one side by a few scrubby trees, a litter bin and the half-burnt railings of a pavilion. The sound of a car pulling up, accompanied by strains of Van Morrison from its stereo, and a slightly shambling figure appears. Some mild byplay ensues with kit bag, dog excrement, a boundary marker and sun-cream. Up to this point the play feels rather like Beckett introduced to an English summer afternoon. But more and more figures appear on the scene, and soon an entire amateur cricket team is lounging, stretching, bickering and joking on the grass.
Catches and Slips
The Nightwatchmen are a loosely-knit group of cricketers, whose members include a hungover civil servant, a good-humoured lay preacher, a young gay British Asian and a wisecracking ex-rock star, and a disillusioned sixties radical who has become a right-wing intellectual. Strictly speaking, we never see the “action”, since the whole play takes place on the edge of the boundary, between people who are waiting to bat, keeping score, or making tea.
If this all sounds very low-temperature and mild, Bean manages to crank up tension imperceptibly through the minor rituals of the group – the obsessive joke-telling, the correct way to enter and leave the field, the spelling of names – so it doesn’t seem illogical when the explosions happen, and characters are yelling at each other about Islamic extremism or weeping over a broken marriage and a lost sense of life’s meaning.
Stumped for a Message
The team are a fantastic dramatic device; they’re physically and emotionally convincing, whilst also pointing to larger questions about Britain and identity. Their name “The Nighwatchmen” borrows a cricket term to suggest they’re somehow transitional, playing in the dusk, involved in something bigger than themselves. However, Bean never forces a message on us. It is perfectly possible to enjoy The English Game as a penetrating character study in its own right, and even if the audience do look for a larger meaning, it would be very difficult to point to any of the character’s as the “author’s mouthpiece.”
The disillusioned radical Will (created and currently played by Robert East) produces some bitter and exhilarating rhetoric on the subject of the state of the nation, and in particular the London bombings (“they’re fascists, they’re racists, and they’re bastards”), but his tirades about the self-hatred of the British so nearly fall into the category of indulgent self-hatred themselves. The mild, tolerant, self-deprecating Christianity of Theo (Howard Ward) is an appealing alternative, but it only leads to pained introspection and eventual withdrawal from the day’s problems. The English Game doesn’t provide answers, but rather a generous, hilarious and touching theatrical experience.
