Cricket and theatre have lengthy been intimate bedfellows. Stroll spherical Lord’s on a Check match day and also you meet extra actors than at an Fairness AGM. Playwrights from Beckett and Pinter to Rattigan and Hare have been drawn to the sport for apparent causes: that cricket, like drama, is a formalised ritual pulsating with subtext. That's palpably true of the most recent cricket play, I Don’t Suppose We’ve Met, written by Ian Smith, an instructional and ex-captain of Pinter’s staff, The Gaieties. It was given a one-off efficiency this week at a London dinner emcee’d by Graham Gooch: a unprecedented occasion that was about much more than the sport itself.
Smith’s topic is the good cricketer Colin Cowdrey, who, as a batsman, was a mannequin of class: in my favorite cricket guide, Australia 55, Alan Ross wrote of the younger Cowdrey that “he positioned and drove the ball to the on with a distribution of stability that will have delighted Michelangelo”. However Smith’s start line is the way in which Cowdrey, in his early forties, was summoned at brief discover to affix an England staff suffering from accidents on the Australia tour of 1974. This triggers Cowdrey’s reminiscences of his complete profession, together with his first tour of Australia beneath his admired captain Len Hutton, and the torrid time he endured within the West Indies in 1959-60 and 1963 dealing with the quick bowling of Wes Corridor and Charlie Griffith.
“What do they of cricket know who solely cricket know?” CLR James famously requested, and Smith’s play inevitably turns into about one thing greater than Cowdrey’s heroics on the crease. I see it as a celebration of a chivalric courtesy quickly turning into outmoded in an age of business opportunism. In one of many key scenes, Cowdrey is invited by the England captain, Tony Greig, to affix a breakaway Gamers’ Affiliation that can vastly enhance the incomes energy of cricketers. Rejecting Greig’s blandishments, Cowdrey quietly replies: “I’ve all the time performed for greater than what I’m paid.” On his return residence in 1975, Cowdrey is dismayed to study that his good friend Ted Heath is being changed as chief of the Conservative celebration by Margaret Thatcher, which can finally result in an much more profound elevation of the profit-motive.
You could possibly argue that the comfortably-off Cowdrey didn’t have to fret about cash. However the play is actually in regards to the public advantage, and the skilled price, of Cowdrey’s innate good manners. What makes the play shifting is that the function of Colin Cowdrey is performed by his son, Chris. Though he frequently hosts public occasions, Chris has no appearing expertise however appears to have inherited the familial modesty: he informed me that individuals continually inform him that he resembles his father – besides when he’s taking part in cricket. Ian Smith skilfully voices quite a lot of characters, together with Tony Greig, Peter Could and John Arlott, and Stephanie Tripp each performs Mrs Cowdrey and supplies the svelte narration.
As for the title of the play – which might be an ideal match for Radio 4 – it derives from a well-known encounter in Australia in 1974 when the newly arrived Cowdrey, on going out to bat, politely launched himself to the quick bowler Jeff Thomson, by saying, “I don’t suppose we’ve met – I’m Colin Cowdrey,” to which Thomson elegantly replied, “That’s not going that will help you, fatso. Now piss off.”
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