Month: May 2024

English by Sanaz Toossi, The Other Place, 13 May 2024

We saw a preview on our first night in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The next day, we went back for a talk and discussion with several of the creatives for this production.

Janie and I really enjoyed this play/production. We had just arrived in Stratford on a four-day short break and were quite tired that evening. Nevertheless this play held our attention throughout, making us smile., laugh and think in equal measure.

It is set in an “English As A Foreign Language” class in Karaj, Iran, c2008. A class of four, each with their own reason for wanting or needing to attend this class and gain a “Test-Of-English-As-A -Foreign-Language” certificate are taught by a hugely enthusiastic Iranian woman who loves the English language and tries to instil that enthusiasm in her variously enthusiastic, reluctant and/or cognitively-conflicted students.

A recipe for some interesting drama, which is exactly what we got.

The RSC does good stubs for its productions these days – here is a link that tells you all about it, so I don’t have to.

As we saw one of the last previews, I suspect that little will have changed since we saw this production. Having said that, as we ascertained at the talk/discussion the next day, director Diyan Zoya is very hands-on in working with a cast to improve continuously throughout and beyond the preview period.

In the discussion, we saw and heard from not only Diyan Zoya but also Maria Tarokh (movement and cultural advisor) and Sara Amini (assistant director text and dialect). The discussion was led by Conrad Lynch, who has produced the show.

We thought the play and production excellent. Reviews have started to come out (he says, writing just a few days after the press night). This link is a search term that should find most or all of them. The reviews so far have been mixed, with Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph not liking it a lot and Arifa Akbar in The Guardian slamming it. Yet it gets good or excellent reviews from Amya Ryan in the Times, Michael Davies in WhatsOnStage and Catherine Love in The Stage to name but three others.

Perhaps best to see it and judge for yourselves – Janie and I thought it was 90 minutes very well spent in the theatre.

Howzat? Missing – Going Way Down The Off-Side: TESTMATCH by Kate Attwell, Orange Tree Theatre, 4 May 2024

It looked like such a good idea in the flyer months ago…

We love The Orange Tree Theatre and try to support as much as we can, especially when it gets around to promoting new writing on topics that interest us.

We love cricket. That includes women’s cricket. We were there at Lord’s when England Women played India Women in the World Cup Final in 2017:

When Everything Went The Right Way, Women’s World Cup Final, Lord’s, 23 July 2017

TESTMATCH by Kate Attwell is described in all its detail on The Orange Tree website – click here. For those who don’t like to click, here’s the central synopsis that hooked me and Janie for two [did you see what I did there?]:

Lord’s, present day. It’s the Women’s Cricket World Cup: England versus India. There’s a rain delay. Tensions mount, ambitions are laid bare and a whole new tactical game begins. Calcutta in the eighteenth century. Two British administrators in colonial India encounter challenges on the field of play that threaten the entire regime.  

In this game of integrity and power, past and present collide. Kate Attwell’s funny and provocative play explores and explodes the mythology of fair play. 

Extracted from The Orange Tree blurb for TESTMATCH

You’ll also spot some good-looking summary reviews if you click that link, so might conclude that Janie and I are in a minority when we report that we both found this play and production a dud.

Heaven knows, I might sometimes look like a caricature of an MCC member trying to look young and hip at Lord’s…

What do you mean, TRYING to look hip?

…but I’ll have you know that Janie and I were watching women’s cricket and I was campaigning for women to be allowed into The Bowlers’ Bar at Lord’s before several of the current England and Middlesex players who play at Lord’s were even born.

The problems we had with TESTMATCH were many and varied. We thought the script repetitive, the jokes mostly unfunny and the important points, of which there were many, delivered without subtlety and often with counter-effective impact if impact at all.

In truth, the whole piece felt like an excuse to discuss a whole heap of very real issues around race, gender, commercial power and fair play, delivered like me trying to hit the cover off a cricket ball with a long-handled bat – i.e. terrible mishits such that they either missed the metaphorical ball completely or hit that metaphor up in the air for a dolly catch.

We are used to suspending belief for theatre, but the notion that such conversations and action could possibly take place in The Lord’s Pavilion during a rain interval in a major women’s international match shows ignorance of how professional the women’s game has become in the 20+ years since Janie and I started following international women’s cricket.

And don’t get me started on the notion that women cricketers might have been advocating roundarm and/or overarm bowling at the time of the Great Bengal famine.

It was hard to tell whether the cast was limited by ability, the script or some eccentric directing, but the style of delivery came across to us as more like “try hard am-dram” than professional performance.

But heck, if you are considering seeing this play, you should read the theatre reviews, which I hadn’t read before writing the above. On the whole, they support our criticisms, but come down far more favourably on this production than we did. Click here for links to reviews.

For me, the highlight of the evening was getting to bowl at one of the performers a couple of times at the end of the interval. Had I realised it was supposed to be 1770, I’d have bowled underarm. And had I realised that my 20-30 mph dobblers would seem fast in the restricted space of The Orange Tree, I’d have tried to bowl even slower than usual.

Is it possible to bowl slower than this?

A member of the audience even praised my bowling as we left. A gentleman who is easily pleased, he might well have also enjoyed the play.