Batting for Godot: the play about Beckett and Pinter teaming up for a game of cricket

Samuel 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 Theatre 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 favourite playwrights, Aeschylus and Euripides, but where he takes the underworld as his setting, 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