Ahhh, Summer!
The dappled sunlight filtering through the trees, the lazy drone of foraging bees, the gentle “thwack” of leather on willow, the optimistic call of “Owzat?”
Why on earth am I writing about cricket, I hear you ask. Thorpe Players isn’t a cricket team, though you could count Graham Thorpe perhaps, as he is a cricket player . Well, there are many topics for plays, and cricket is one of them. Comparing acting to cricket is difficult though. There is the teamwork involved in both, of course, but dialogue is more like a tennis match, as words are batted to and fro between the players. Both are summer games, but cricket seems to epitomise it more.
Once upon a time, we presented Richard Harris’ play from 1979 – “Outside Edge” – about a village cricket team trying to win a match whilst sorting out their various marital problems. As you can see from the picture, we had to build a cricket pavilion on our little stage, as well as enough of the field to make sense. This was back in 1993, hence the quality of the picture not being very good. But the writing and the characters were excellent. The over-confident captain, and his put upon wife, who had to do all the catering as well as everything else. The spiv, always with a deal (though it turned out he was no spiv, and he financed the ‘deals’ himself). The young heart-throb, who knows his worth, and his glamorous girlfriend, who knows it as well. Each and every character individual and clearly defined. Acting these and the other characters made a tight knit team of us, and drew in the audience with the comedy of the script. We enjoyed ourselves immensely, without hitting a ball in anger.
And really, that is what makes a good play; characters you can build on and into, and a script that gives you both humour and emotion. Getting that balance right is equally important whether the play is a farce or a tragedy. It also makes it much more enjoyable to be involved in. Maybe acting has more in common with cricket than I thought!
This play was important for another thing. It had the first poster I designed using a newfangled computer programme. Oh the glory days of 1993 when that was a novelty!
Valerie Lane
chair@thorpeplayers.co.uk
