Two men sit on a bench somewhere in the Cotswolds. They are waiting to take their turn in a cricket match. Later, they will wait for the team captain, Doggo, to give them a lift back somewhere. They will also wait for a train, and when that seems not to be coming, they will wait for a horse to carry them perhaps to Banbury.
Since it is 1964 and the two imagined characters are Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, you might begin to chuckle that this is a sketch about Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but then increasingly there is the addition of menace provided by mysterious phone calls and the annoyance of a teammate we never meet who was “run out” because Pinter, in a scene we don’t see, impulsively told his batting partner, “yes, no, wait.” You wonder perhaps if the play is also wandering into Pinter’s Dumb Waiter.
As they wait for a train or a horse or Doggo, they gently bicker. Pinter rubs a pack of frozen peas on his injured ankle, while Beckett logs the scores in a book. They drink a cup of tea, though Beckett’s is too strong and an insect lands in Pinter’s. Later they will drink some beer.
To continue the literary allusions, they occasionally riff on Shakespeare with, for instance, one saying, “let us sit on the green and tell sad stories of the fall of batsmen.”
Stephen Tompkinson plays a slightly stressed, occasionally irritable Beckett to Andrew Lancel’s more laid-back, laconic Pinter. Nothing much happens very slowly over seventy minutes. The play runs on slight humour and the cartoon outlines of its famous name characters.
No depth is intended, and no context is provided. This light entertainment is simply harmless fun that might make you smile.