Cricket, colonialism clash in ‘Testmatch’
Kate Attwell's provocative play premieres at ACT
The rough-and-tumble world of sports often taps into the true nature of a society, what it really is versus what it pretends to be.
In Kate Attwell’s provocative “Testmatch,” now in its breathtakingly messy and ambitious world premiere at American Conservatory Theater’s Strand Theater in San Francisco, a long history of racism, greed and violence simmers to a boil during a women’s cricket match. The tense relationship between England and India, a connection rife with post-colonial rage, is the star of this explosive if unfinished new play. Smartly directed by ACT artistic director Pam MacKinnon, this time-traveling adventure through gender, power and racism runs through Dec. 8.
While the narrative seems steeped in British colonial history, the rise and fall of an empire, the themes grow more chaotic and universal with each scene until it’s clear the playwright is trying to capture the timeless impulse to grab money and power no matter the cost to humanity. That’s a theme more relevant now than ever.
In the first act, bats are smashed and cups of tea poured as members of the two teams teams face off in the player’s lounge during a key Cricket World Cup match. Rain has forced them off the field and now their hostilities turn to words instead of wickets.
Queen bee England 1 (Madeline Wise) lights the fire, smashing her bat in uncontrolled fury. The blustering England 2 (Arwen Anderson) ups the ante, rushing to hurl a racial epithet at the quietly dignified India 1 (Meera Rohit Kumbhani)
only to back away from it at the last second. The insult hangs in the air, roiling the emotions like a slap in the face.
No matter how many cups of tea the placating England 3 (Millie Brooks) pours, the bitter history of the Raj can never be fully digested. The English players don’t know what all the fuss is about while the Indian ones are still traumatized by the legacy of famine and bloodshed the British left behind.
England 2 is arrogant about who owns the game. India “wouldn’t even have this game if we hadn’t brought it,” she sneers.
To which India 1 retorts: “You really want to talk about all the things we ‘wouldn’t have’ if you hadn’t brought them?”
The crackling suspense of Act 1 sadly gets muddled in Act 2 when the narrative takes a Caryl Churchillstyle leap through time, to Calcutta in the age of Britain’s iconic East India Co., a corporation which pillaged the land and beat its people into submission. The timetraveling segue doesn’t yet pay off although the allfemale cast nimbly leaps through genders and periods.
Wise particularly shines as the predatory team captain in Act 1 and the opiumaddled Memsahib in Act 2, sublime as the character succumbs to her dystopian visions of colonialism. Lipica Shah brings the same delicious sense of irony to her roles as a cricket player and a servant, both characters who know better than to speak truth to power. While Anderson and Brooks are quite deft as two wigged and blithering English fops lording it over the dying Indian peasants, there’s little real comic relief in these over-the-top scenes of capitalism run amok.
Attwell cleverly exposes some unsettling and overlooked chapters in British history, the way a country can convince itself it’s civilized, casually nibbling on tea and crumpets midway through a genocide. The impulse to look away from things we don’t want to see is what makes the world go round, the play suggests.
That’s part of the playwright’s bracing genius. Attwell’s text loses its coherence in Act 2 and she has yet to find an ending that feels satisfying, but her aspirations remain sharp and stimulating. The cautionary tale she spins of a world order unable to acknowledge its sins hits hard in this era of inconvenient truths and looming tragedies. Once corruption gets into the bloodstream, there’s little hope the patient can recover.