Funny Girl (Minerva Theatre, Chichester)

Norman Tebbit's cricket test has had a good innings.

Mostly though, it’s been used to bolster conventional notions of Englishness by asking: whom do you support when national teams take the field?

But the clever thing about Richard Bean’s new comedy is that it challenges Tebbit on  his own pitch and knocks conventional notions for six.

Definitely cricket: The English Game

The setting is an amateur cricket match somewhere in South-West London. A longstanding team gather for their weekly game.

They’re a motley bunch ranging from a sullen plumber to a chipper doctor, a histrionic actor to the jocular bass guitarist of a 1970s rock band.

They’re mostly white, but the team also includes a keen young Indian and a young black man who’s getting married.

Bean mixes them all up with whiffy locker room banter and those with delicate sensibilities may prefer not to stay at the crease for long.

What emerges, though, is a line-up of attitudes from the liberal to the racist, and the ethnic to the mainstream, that is not only funny in its diversity, but typically English.

The defining feature of Englishness turns out to be that we can have nothing in common and look down on each other, yet love playing for the same team.

It’s not a radical thesis, and it has problems. The Indian and black characters are peripheral, and at one point Bean has a character take a banal and unchallenged pop at Islam.

What really drives the play, however, is not the message but the repartee. The characters bowl bouncers and googlies at one another from start to stumps and although some catches are dropped, it’s a spirited team performance throughout.

Sean Holmes’s production is also infectiously ladsy, played out on an astro-turf hillockgarnished with a Danish-pastry dog turd.

Sean Murray as Thiz, the bleached-barneted, middle-aged rock ’n’ roll casualty, is a  fondly disreputable creation, and Tony Bell is a Captain Marvel who’d rather lose than break the rules. 

John Lightbody and Howard Ward are equally charming as the self-dramatising actor and the evangelical doctor.

And even Fred Ridgeway as a snarling bigot is impossible not to forgive.

Howzat Norman!

Verdict: Nicely caught

***