Yes... No... Wait

“Yes… No… Wait”—a classic piece of confused calling from a batsman, putting his partner at risk. “Yes” means he should start running, “no” tells him he should stop and try to turn back, “wait” means I haven’t decided yet so hold on a minute.

Out of the blue I was recently sent a play of this name, written by Shomit Dutta. We had met at a celebration of Harold Pinter’s life and work at Lord’s in 2009.

The play is a delight; it had me laughing out loud. Tight, witty, zany and, to me, touching.

Samuel Beckett and Harold (I knew Harold, and greatly admired him, though not without a tinge of apprehension), spend act one waiting to go in to bat—at numbers five and six respectively—in a game played in a Cotswold village. Two wickets are down. Beckett has his pads on (but also a greatcoat) and is keeping score. Pinter is bemoaning his sore ankle, bruised while saving a four off Beckett’s bowling earlier in the game. Beckett is dry, anxious, sarcastic, gloomy; Pinter choleric, blundering, passionate and intense.

I won’t tell you about act two, except to say that both men—after several hours of whisky drinking—are waiting for a lift home later that evening from a man who probably batted at number seven, and who may be in a crazed, murderous state, having been run out without having faced a ball by his fellow batter. His name may be Doggo. It’s also possible that Doggo doesn’t exist. A car approaches. A man gets out, standing in silhouette, stage left. Pinter keeps hold of his bat, concealing it as a weapon. Beckett has slipped away.

Dutta is currently working on a digital release of the play with a potential livestage production to follow.

Pinter was vocal on the subject of cricket. “Certainly greater than sex,” he said, “though sex isn’t too bad either.” He wrote on the “hidden violence of cricket.” And said that “when we play, my club, each thing that happens is dramatic: the gasps that follow a miss at slip, the anger of an lbw decision turned down.”

Cricket is drama. Each little event, each delivery is between two protagonists: batter and bowler, in the context of a team event. The etymology of the word “theatre” is something to be seen, a spectacle; whereas you don’t need an audience for a cricket match—Leicester on a damp Thursday morning, two men and a dog, and only the dog awake. One angle offered by the word “sport” is something to take pleasure in, to amuse oneself with, as in “sport with Amaryllis in the shade.” Pinter would be fuming at this implication of triviality.

In my view, as in his, sport is more aptly described and defined as agonistic—a matter of contest, with winner, loser and the possibility of a draw (when one side has been outplayed from the first over to the last, but time runs out, you can play for a draw).

Competition is what comes to distinguish sport from other physical activities that also evolve from childhood play—yoga, dancing, singing, acting— “becoming” a toy dog, say. My granddaughter, after receiving a toy dog as a party leaving present, began barking in the back of the car as I drove her home. “Is the dog talking to you?” I asked. “No, Mike,” she said with affectionate condescension, “I’m being the dog. Don’t you know that’s what toys are for?” “Play” carries in its range and overtones something essential to both theatre and cricket. Pinter again bears this out. So often his characters vie for the position of top dog. Play, yet not without menace: utterly serious.

Cricket is violence, superiority, subtlety, pressure—all made possible by its civilising rules, and by an ethos of playing hard but fair.

The Pinter of the play wades in combatively, says yes then no, ends with wait. What would Beckett’s call have been?

As in life, Dutta’s Beckett (late 50s) is a generation older than Pinter (late- to mid30s). Beckett was Pinter’s hero. But in the play, Pinter is argumentative with his hero and father figure. In the opening lines,

there is an exchange where Beckett wants to “secure his exit” (that is, his lift home after the match), “an old habit from my days in the French resistance,” to which Pinter replies, sardonically and deflatingly, “we’re currently in the Cotswolds.” The play’s true father turns out to be Doggo, like Godot, or perhaps Oh-God. But between Beckett and Pinter there is quasi-paternal rivalry, impatience as well as admiration.

In act two, Beckett the father figure appears with a bandage on his head. It turns out that it was Pinter’s straight drive that caused the damage. Like an adolescent, Pinter the character causes trouble all over the place: “No... Yes... Wait.”

Beckett is the cautious father—cutting, subtle, anxious. For him, hopes have been deferred, if not disappointed, for decades. This is maybe what Waiting for Godot suggests about the meaning of life: we wait, we pass the time that would have passed anyway, we are naturally in doubt and anxious. That is it. The characters find at most only a trace of Godot.

Should they (we) instead expect Doggo, wielding a knife? (But perhaps it’s only Beckett himself, lying doggo?)

This cricket match takes me back to the annual game between the school XI and the staff, captained by my father Horace, a doughty Yorkshireman brought up in that hard school.

As a young man, Horace was walking off after scoring a century for Heckmondwike, when an old member in a cloth cap said to him: “well played son; but tha’ wouldn’t have scored a oondred if tha’ father had been bowling (rhyming with towelling).” Don’t, in other words, get too far ahead of yourself. My father would let me get to 20-16 at table tennis and then beat me 22-20. I knew he wanted the best for me, but he also wanted me to know that I had much to learn. As an adult, I started to beat him at squash (and make him red in the face with exertion), but only when I risked causing him some sort of attack. Pyrrhic victories.

As for the staff match: I tried to hit my father’s gentle off-spin over the top, got too close to the ball, and hit it quite hard but straight at mid-on’s chest. My father shouted “catch it”; mid-on, frightened by his urgency, promptly dropped the ball.

My father’s supposed ally at mid-on had let him down. The son was let off the hook. But there are hooks, rivalries, conflicts, as there are between Beckett and Pinter, tied together in love and rivalry, in the Oedipal wounding, and in the lifelong anxieties about who trumps whom. The boy must wait his turn.

“Wait… wait… wait?” Perhaps that will be Beckett’s call and the title of Dutta’s next play.

I knew my father wanted the best for me, but he also wanted me to know that I had much to learn