By Shomit Dutta. Starring Barry McGovern and Michael James Ford. Directed by Bairbre Ní Chaoimh.
Before Samuel Beckett became the playwright universally known for Waiting for Godot, he was a cricketer. He is still the only Nobel prize-winner to feature in the pages of Wisden as a first-class player. His friend and fellow Nobel prize-winner, Harold Pinter, whose best-known works include The Birthday Party and Betrayal, described cricket as ‘the greatest thing that God created on earth’. Stumped is a brilliant absurdist comedy, which explores the friendship between these two great men and the strains imposed upon it by the most civilised of summer sports.