Tag: Rajiv Pattani

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.

Lands by Antler, Bush Studio, 17 November 2018

“We haven’t been to the theatre for ages”, said Daisy. In a way she was right.  A little over two months:

The Human Voice by Jean Cocteau, Gate Theatre, 14 September 2018

…ages in our terms. Mind you, I had been to see Casablanca The Musical a couple of weeks later…

A Visit To Halifax To See A Revival Of Casablanca The Musical & The Ward Family, 26 September 2018

…and anyway several weeks in Japan mid October to early November had plenty of drama in its own way.

We had booked Lands ages ago, based on the sparse but intriguing description on the Bush website. We didn’t look at the little promotional video about it, but there is one – see below:

We’ve been fans of the Bush for yonks and have become especially enamored with the Studio there, since it opened eighteen months or so ago.

This short play, Lands, is exactly the sort of thing we like to see at a place like the Bush Studio.

It is really quite a strange piece. One young woman is obsessively, slowly working her way through a massive jigsaw puzzle while the other jumps up and down on a trampoline throughout most of the play.

Much is left unexplained, but the pair might well be a couple; at the very least there are strong hints that they know each other well and have done so for a long while.

In one early coup-de-theatre, they perform a wonderful synchronized dance to Ain’t That Terrible by Roy Redmond…

…a great track btw, that Daisy and I both remember dancing to in the clubs way back when. It had both of us wracking our brains (unsuccessfully) in our attempts to identify the record.

Ellie at the Bush kindly put us out of our misery with the song title and artist, which helped us to avoid our own domestic the following Monday. Thanks Ellie – otherwise I might have obsessively blogged and Daisy might have obsessively pole-danced non-stop for a week. Not safe.

But I digress.

There were some very funny moments in the play – not least that dance – but also several very poignant scenes. While the play is, in many ways, an absurdist piece, there is enough realism in the scenario and the manner in which the drama pans out to be very affecting.

Both Leah Brotherhead and Sophie Steer perform their parts extremely well; the switches of mood – a couple of times turning on a proverbial sixpence, very deftly done.

In some ways the nub of the play is the domestic drama about the obsessions that seem to be pulling these people apart from each other, but in other ways it is about the causes of such obsessions. Towards the end of the play, the Leah character rants about all the things she doesn’t care about. But of course she must care about those things to some extent if she feels motivated to rant quite so viscerally about not caring. Perhaps Leah’s obsessions (or both women’s obsessions) are ways of shutting out the world because they cannot cope with caring about so much that is wrong.

In truth we weren’t expecting a piece quite as challenging as this one but we agreed that we were very glad to have experienced it once we got home and started chatting about it over our supper.

Just the sort of thing the Bush Studio should be putting on – great stuff. Here again is a link to the Bush resource on the production…

…while here is a link to reviews and stuff.

Ramona Tells Jim by Sophie Wu, Bush Studio, 14 October 2017

This is the third time we have been to the new Bush Studio and the third time we have been thrilled by the results there. From our point of view, this is akin to the wonders of the Hampstead Downstairs as a source of top notch fringe theatre.

Click here for a link to the Bush’s on-line resource for the Ramona Tells Jim play/production.

Spanning 15 years, the play depicts the fumbling, youthful love between Ramona and Jim as teenagers, as well as the lingering aftermath of those fleeting but life-changing events.

Here is an embedded trailer for the production, which shows snippets of the junior scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQzStt77Cg4

The playwright, Sophie Wu, is a new name to us. Apparently she is more TV and film actress  than playwright at this stage of her career. We’ll certainly be looking out for her plays again. Ramona Tells Jim is a charming, short piece – very impressive as an early effort.

This search term – click here – digs out plenty of reviews. In truth the reviews speak more highly of the production than the play, claiming some lack of depth and/or plausibility in the latter. But what do the reviewers know? We thought this was 80-90 minutes of high quality, thought-provoking, dark comedy.

Extremely well acted and directed too; the reviewers certainly agree with us on that. Director Mel Hillyard wowed us as recently as March with Scarlett at the Hampstead Dowstairs and also last year with the Brink at the Orange Tree. She is certainly a director to watch.

We had also seen Ruby Bentall before, although I had to look this up to recall where; in DNA and The Miracle at the Cottesloe yonks ago. All of the performers were very good indeed.

The audience had their moments on the night we attended. The Bush was very quiet that evening, as the next production in the main house (Of Kith and Kin – we’re going to that in a couple of week’s time) has not yet opened. Just before the doors were due to open (15 minutes before scheduled the start of the play), two members of staff went through and locked the door behind them. One couple, seeing people go in, went running up to the door and banged on it fervently, thinking that they had missed the start of the show, perhaps unused to 19:45 start times for the new studio rather than 19:30 in the main house.

“We must be the most stupid people on earth”, said the door-banging chap as the couple joined the rest of us in a sedate drinking/milling around mode for a few more minutes.

Actually, the most stupid people on earth award for the evening might go to the woman next to me who left her mobile phone on, noisily pinging through texts and e-mails during the 1998 scenes – very incongruous noise – until she realised the problem was her, at which point she tried to rectify the problem discreetly, hoping no-one would notice that it was her. Plenty of people noticed, love.

Next up for a stupid award was the woman who insisted on rattling her voluminous drink ice around in her glass like a teenager noisily munching popcorn in the cinema, then later cackling like a hyena at the fumbling sex scene which was surely whimsical pathos humour rather than guffaw humour to anyone old enough to know better, which this woman surely was.

Crumbs, the above paragraphs infer that we had an irritating evening but we really didn’t – we came home truly delighted with the play and the production. We had a light supper of salami and cream cheese baguettes with some salad stuff, washed down with a very jolly Dão red.

Highly commended by both me and Janie – we’ll be looking out again for the talent that was on show – writing, directing, producing and acting.

Nassim by Nassim Soleimanpour, Bush Studio, 29 July 2017

We loved this innovative, short piece.

It is described well, along with all the information you could possibly want, on the Bush site – here.

It is performed (alongside the author) by a different performer each night, who has not seen the script.  We got Phelim McDermott, who is one of the artistic directors of Improbable. He was very good.

The piece is, on the surface, very simple, childish even. Yet the more you think about it, the more you realise that Nassim is making profound points about freedom of speech, not least the pains people like him go through when they leave their home country (in his case Iran) in order to communicate what they have to say in a foreign place and a foreign language.

We sat right at the front but managed to avoid the worst elements of the audience participation. Having said that, I got the dirtiest of dirty looks from Phelim when I tried to help him follow his instructions, by pointing to an “X marks the spot” which was located next to my seat.

We weren’t just moved and thoughtful; we laughed a lot during the 70 minutes or so. Nassim is clearly a very innovative and skilled dramatist; we’ll certainly look out for his work again.

This Bush run is an Edinburgh preview – I think this piece will go down very well in Edinburgh. It is then returning to The Bush for a while after Edinburgh – I recommend that you grab a ticket for that while/if you still can, if you like this sort of thing.

Janie and I had a crazy craving for Iranian food after Nassim’s homesick piece, so decided to try Rice Chiswick, which we found very satisfactory. Not quite Mohsen’s standard, but close and very convenient for the Bush.

A splendid evening.