HEADLONG

Bean, one of our finest and most prolific dramatists, has played a good deal of club cricket over the years, and has the knackered knees to prove it. His play is a sometimes spiky valentine to the game that has absorbed him for so long, as he depicts an amateur London team, the Nightwatchmen, on a hot August Sunday. All the cricketing action takes place off stage. What we see is the team on the boundary before, during and after the match, cracking jokes, gossiping idly, winding each other up and fretting about the match in progress.

It is no mean technical achievement to bring more than a dozen characters, with ages ranging from 13 to 89, to dramatic life, and Bean is excellent at the dynamics of male relationships - the joshing banter, the genuine sympathy, the sudden moments of cruelty, tension and rivalry. And, though Bean is hardly the first to seize on cricket as an emblem of England itself, this often wildly funny play proves a satisfying and at times provocative state-of-the-nation drama.

It is a splendidly rich play, and Sean Holmes's production for the Headlong company, beautifully designed by Anthony Lamble, finds all its strengths.Robert East combines the angry and the rueful as the devoted cricketer who hates what is happening to England, Sean Murray is continuously hilarious as a garrulous middle-aged rock star, while Fred Ridgeway achieves a memorable combination of meanness of spirit and emotional neediness as the visiting player.

The English Game is a blinder that knocked me for six. Catch it!

The setting is the edge of a London park where The Nightwatchmen have come to play their weekly game of recreational cricket. Like most such teams, they are made up of odd bods united only by their sporting obsession. Their nominal captain, Will, is an old crock, whose air of benign liberalism turns out to be misleading. The match skipper, meanwhile, is a mixed-up journo with a disintegrating marriage. And the motley team includes a joke-spinning rock legend, a gay Hindu, an Oxbridge actor, a doctor, a plumber and a British Council desk-wallah who happens to be black. The one newcomer is a mouthy Telecoms worker who idolises Enoch Powell.

Far from being a rigged assembly, this is a fair representation of weekend cricket teams. And what Bean brings out beautifully is the way cricket, while briefly unifying a disparate group, can no longer disguise the fractious nature of modern England.

You do not have to be a cricket nut - as I am - to relish the play. And Sean Holmes, in this touring Headlong production, captures exactly the rhythms of an English summer day, in which a patch of green is filled with hectic activity and then quietly empties. As in cricket, a team effort also allows individuals to shine (which may be why the game is so adored by actors): Robert East as the deceptive Will, Howard Ward as the good doctor, Fred Ridgeway as the bumptious intruder and Tony Bell as the unhappy hack score all round the wicket. There have been good plays about cricket before, such as Richard Harris's Outside Edge and Ayckbourn's Time and Time Again, but none that told us so much about our splintering land.