Stumped – Hampstead Theatre
How would a game of cricket with two Nobel prizes of literature playing in one of the teams unravel? In Stumped, we get to see a hypothesis about it, with touches of surrealism all around.
In this play, written by Shomit Dutta, and directed by Guy Unsworth, the audience finds Samuel Beckett, played by Stephen Tompkinson, and Harold Pinter, played by Andrew Lancel, in a game of cricket and its aftermath, trying to get back home. The slightly outrageous situations that come up, including a ball in the head, and the fear to wait or be alone, make this play an interesting take on a non-naturalistic style of theatre.
The stage, beautifully designed by David Woodhead, is like painting. This leads one to think that what we'll see will be a creation, no matter what. The walls on the stage a...