The concept of Shomit Dutta’s play Stumped is certainly unusual.
Andrew Lancel as Harold Pinter and Stephen Tompkinson as Samuel Beckett in Stumped | Photo © Tristram Kenton
Two celebrated playwrights (Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett), both real-life cricket enthusiasts, wait their turn to play a game on a Cotswolds pitch, all the while indulging in some light-hearted rivalry and banter. And after the match, they need to sort their transport…
The problem is that it doesn’t really develop from that initial set-up into something of broader appeal, but resolutely remains a 75-minute two-man cerebral in-joke solely for fans of Beckett, Pinter and, yes, maybe cricket. Whoever else this is intended for is unclear.
The fault is not in the performances. Stephen Tompkinson is droll, expansive and needling as Beckett, and Andrew Lancel gives us an entertainingly buttoned-up limping Pinter. Their easy chemistry works well.
But Original Theatre’s production (freshly expanded from its original incarnation as an online piece) is lost on the Theatre Royal stage, squeezed into David Woodhead’s mini set inside an unexplained picture frame.
It’s essentially two men sitting on, or walking around, a bench for its duration, which would work far better in pub theatre or a smaller venue. References to Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are evident (most of the play they are waiting for a character called Doggo to pick them up), but to what purpose?
And by not delving into the characters of either men, it remains an uninvolving intellectual chin-stroking exercise in spotting the allusions, like a surreal fusion of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with Outside Edge.
As intimate pub theatre, this could be a quirky hour and a quarter with a few laughs. At the Theatre Royal, it’s reasonable to expect more.
Stumped is showing at Theatre Royal Bath until 27th May. Box office: 01225 448844.
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Reviewer: Steve Huggins
