3rd form play
In the hilarious farce 'Twelfth Man' by H. Connolly, a team of keen amateur Yorkshire cricketers are expecting to play the WW Cricket Club - the Whitney West Indians, as they think - but the opposition turns out to be not quite what they expect, nor are the events which follow.
With a cast of Year 9 pupils, director Karen Cole presented a captivating tale of romance, pride, deception and rivalry - but most of all humour. The men's captain, the swaggering and boorish Len, superbly characterised by Harvey Morris, cuts a pompously ridiculous figure, as insensitive to his feisty teenage daughter (Holly Matthews) and her clandestine romance with the talented spin bowler (Alex Raleigh) as he is to his beautiful but lonely wife Jean (Isabel Petri) whom he consigns to making crab paste sandwiches. But all changes when he meets his nemesis in the form of a past he'd rather forget …
Finding himself faced with the ignominy of playing a team of 'lasses', who he's sure will have to play with tennis balls, Len turns to his team of brilliantly portrayed eccentric Yorkshiremen, like the chalk-faced undertaker Jack (Tom Lawson), the canny - but very small - doctor (James Collins), the accident-prone Duncan (Matthew Enright) and the devastatingly handsome Ray (Dominic Stuckes) who is about to elope with his wife.
His humiliation at the hands of the gorgeous but deadly fast bowler Mary (Verity Clark) and her team is compounded by the sudden appearance of a flamboyant American woman (Olivia Feilden) with whom he had a brief fling twenty-five years before, when he acquired an embarrassing tattoo of his nickname 'Snugglebum'.
When he discovers that he is the father of her son, the play discovers a real poignancy as Len's delusions lie in tatters, and he begins the painful path to forgiveness and reconciliation with the wife he would imminently have lost. The play ends with mushy peas for all and a nasty accident in the men's urinals …
This was a feel-good play, lots of belly laughs at well-timed slapstick humour, along with some hints of more trenchant satire of male chauvinism in the world of sport. The sound of Len's stumps being shattered may send a frisson of fear down the pads of every aspiring male cricketer who sees the play. Women cricketers? Be afraid, be very afraid.