Testmatch – Orange Tree Theatre, London

Writer: Kate Attwell

Director: Diane Page

Kate Attwell’s comedy, Testmatch, is a lively and energetic show for a cast of six women. In the first half, we’re mid-match with team members from the England Women’s World Cup team and their counterparts from India. Rain has stopped play. The players naturally moan about this. But there’s only so much humour you can get out of the cliché about poor English weather.

Inevitably various rivalries spring to life, as one dippy member of the English team obsesses about her ex-boyfriend, also a cricketer. She repeatedly brings up her theory that ‘rugby boys’ are preferable to ‘cricket boys’, but again the comic mileage in this is limited. There is a subplot about match-fixing. Meanwhile, a team member has accepted sponsorship from a big-name beauty company. As tensions rise, they all become very shouty. In fact, in many ways, the whole piece is shouty, both in terms of its volume and its overly emphatic signalling of its themes. Diane Page’s direction seems actively to encourage this, pointing up the text as farce before anything else.

In the second half we are in 18th-century Bengal with two bewigged English men, members of the East India Company, their characters are drawn with a very broad brush. Haylie Jones and Bea Svistunenko clearly enjoy performing the roles. They preen and pose, self-consciously delivering their lines as if they they’re auditioning for parts in Blackadder. The point, in case we missed it, is that the English think they’re superior to India not just in cricket but in all things. References to opium get thrown into the mix.

Mia Turner, who gave us the dippy player in the first half now presents the even more dippy memsahib, off her head on laudanum. Tanya Katyal plays the likeable, put-upon servant Abhi, as well as one of the three modern-day Indian players. Most impressive are Aiyana Bartlett, particularly in her 18th-century part as the visitor Daanya and Aarushi Riya Ganju as the dignified Messenger. Through these characters Atwell allows the frenetic pace of the play temporarily to calm down as she explores more thought-provoking ideas.

In her introduction to the play text, Attwell talks about using sport ‘as a kind of mirror for thinking about things that are systemic and structural’. But Testmatch is too wedded to easy laughs to dig deep. The point about women cricketers is valuable, but the truth, not mentioned by Attwell, is that the first record of a women’s cricket team appears in England in 1745, there being no formal Indian women’s team until the 1920s.

Runs until 18 May 2024