Whether in life or death, Ollie has a place on centre stage
Derek Pringle reveals how a play about one of the game’s most colourful but tragic characters tackles questions of human fraility
As a batsman on song, Colin Milburn was a daunting mass of power intent on putting bowlers to the sword. By the reckoning of two prominent Australians, Don Bradman and Rod Marsh, he played one of the greatest innings ever when he scored 243 against Queensland at the Gabba for Western Australia in 1968, an incredible 181 runs coming between lunch and tea.
His nine Tests for England were not quite as eventful. His two hundreds came in a stop-start international career in which the selectors couldn’t decide whether he was a cartoon cricketer, due to his 18-stone bulk, or the real McCoy. But just as that argument seemed to become settled in favour of the latter, he lost an eye in a car crash. And, as Milburn himself declared: “That was that.”
The putting out of an eye is biblical in its retribution, but one especially cruel for a cricketer whose hand eye co-ordination was a gift from the gods to start with. Some say that all might not have been lost had he lost his right eye and not his left, like the Nawab of Pataudi, who continued to play Test cricket, but the reality was that he’d also damaged his right eye, which thwarted all attempts at a comeback.
The suddenness of such an injury is jarring, which is what makes the play: When The Eye Has Gone, such a poignant title for a life that sometimes had to be seen to be believed.
The play, a one-man show, was written by Jim Graham-Brown, formerly of Kent and Derbyshire, under his pseudonym Dougie Blaxland. After lengthy auditions he and the director, Shane Morgan, settled on Dan Gaisford, a young, slim actor, to play the role, though he does wear a fat cushion as a nod to Milburn’s considerable girth.
The setting is the North Briton public house in Newton Aycliffe (a favourite watering hole of Milburn’s), on what proved to be his last day of his life – 28 February, 1990.
I saw a preview of the play at Northamptonshire County Cricket Club, just next to the old pavilion where Milburn would have changed when he played for Northants in the Sixties. Apposite, too, that the venue is where Samuel Beckett, one of the greatest of all playwrights and cricket’s sole Nobel Laureate, played his only first-class matches for Dublin University.
Once you have suspended disbelief that the lithe, athletic Gaisford is playing a 20-stone man, the performance captures fully the pain and effort of being ‘Jolly Ollie’ and keeping the demons of pity and dwindling self worth at bay, something Milburn would do with industrial amounts of gin and coke.
A soundtrack with songs as varied as Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares To U to the ominous bowed riffs of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir, as well as various BBC commentaries of matches he played in, act as compass points as Milburn trawls back through his life and what might have been.
It is a soliloquy, but one that has many voices filtering through it. Playing everybody from Milburn’s father and mother, Jack and Bertha, to Ken Turner, the sarcastic secretary of Northants, Gaisford prowls dressed in a drab leather coat that would not have been out of place in an episode of The Sweeney, a nondescript white shirt, and black trousers and shoes. There is none of the panache and colour that Milburn brought to his batting, though that is probably the point.
Aside from a bar stool and table, Gaisford’s only props are a tabloid newspaper, a diminishing pint of gin and coke and a bar towel, which doubles as a dusting cloth whenever he voices Bertha, Milburn’s nagging mother whom he feared and loved in equal measure.
Gaisford admitted afterwards that the 90-minute performance, his first solo role, is the most physically and mentally demanding of his career. Switching mood and characters by the minute sees him draw on deep reserves, something Milburn also had to do just to remain the ‘Good old Ollie’ of yore. As the foreboding mounts, though, and Milburn’s wisecracking no longer provides an antidote to the gathering gloom, you realise that hope becomes impossible to resurrect.
The play was commissioned and funded by the Professional Cricketers Association, as well as the Arts Council, to help draw attention to the plight of professional cricketers struggling with self worth following the end of their careers, and not just those whose end as cruelly as Milburn’s did.
The PCA was in its infancy when Milburn’s fate befell him and illequipped to act in any meaningful way. Thankfully, that is no longer the case and while the post-career phase can still be a daunting and bleak place for many cricketers, there is help at hand. All proceeds from the play, which is touring the UK now, will go to the PCA Benevolent Fund.
On the day I watched it several former Northants cricketers who’d played with Milburn were present. Like him, Peter Willey and George Sharpe even hail from the North-east as did Alan Hodgson, who shared a flat with Milburn after the pair first joined the playing staff. Sadly, Hodgson, one of the principal sources for the script, died a few weeks before this performance.
A love of cricket and its characters will enhance one’s enjoyment of the play, but you do not need a grounding in the game to appreciate it. As a piece of theatre it captivates, revealing the very human frailties that underpin even the most stoic of people.
I met Milburn on several occasions only spending time with him on a trip to La Manga, in Spain, in 1984, for Ian Botham’s Benefit, which pitted six cricketers against six celebrities and sportsmen from other fields.
Milburn and Botham were good mates, hard-hitting, hard drinking and always up for the craic. That trip possessed all those elements, being a golf, cricket and tennis challenge (not taken that seriously) with much carousing in between (taken very seriously). Ollie was in his element.
His death at the age of 48, from a heart attack in the car park of the North Briton, is not enacted. Some loud, ominous, bass notes echo a beating heart before jamming together and then breaking into the tune that bears him off to a cricketing heaven, where one eye is every bit as good as two.
A love of cricket and its characters will enhance one’s enjoyment but you do not need a grounding in the game to fully appreciate it