Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

He Knows His Way Around a Half-Butt (That’s Snooker Talk)

The British playwright Richard Bean, at the New York Athletic Club’s billiards room. His latest work, “The Nap,” is all about snooker (which resembles pool).Credit...Aaron Richter for The New York Times

SHEFFIELD, England — “Surely this isn’t the first time you’ve seen topiary snooker players?” asked the playwright Richard Bean with mock incredulity. Two figures, artfully shaped out of robust greenery, leaned, as if poised to pot a ball, on either side of the entrance to the Crucible Theater here.

Not only was it my first experience of snooker-shaped topiary, it was my first experience of snooker — a British version of pool, but, naturally, much more complicated. And my guide was Mr. Bean, whose play about snooker, “The Nap,” begins previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Sept. 5, produced by the Manhattan Theater Club and directed by Daniel Sullivan.

The Crucible usually offers theater of a more traditional sort. But each spring it is the thrumming home of the World Snooker Championship,which draws wall-to-wall television coverage from the BBC and generates obsessive interest here, with crowds gathering all over town to watch the live games on huge television screens set up in public places.

Mr. Bean, 62, the prolific British playwright who wrote “One Man, Two Guvnors,”Great Britain,” “The Mentalists” and a string of other successful plays, knows the Crucible well, since with exquisite site-specific appropriateness, it was here that “The Nap” had its 2016 premiere. Before the start of the quarterfinal match we were to see, he threaded his way familiarly through the backstage corridors, transformed by huge posters of the players, nests of television cables and a press room full of journalists staring at screens and transmitting real-time results and match analysis.

Snooker, Mr. Bean explained, “is sociologically quite interesting, because it’s a working-class game.”

“You read the autobiographies of the top players, the tropes are exactly the same: alcohol, gambling, fast cars, women trouble, dystopian families,” he said. “That’s your raw material really. At the same time it’s unbelievably difficult, and it’s like playing first violin in the Philharmonic; if you haven’t done the 10,000 hours, it’s not going to happen.”

We settled into our seats, ready to watch the match between Mark Williams and Ali Carter, two of the world’s top players. Mr. Bean gave a quick run-down of the rules: There are 21 colored balls, which have different values, and a white cue ball, which the players must hit to “pot” another ball into one of the six pockets on the sides of the table. The balls must be potted in a specific sequence, to score points. Whoever scores the most points wins the “frame” or individual game; the eventual winner of the match must win the best of (usually) 35 frames.

Image
Ali Carter, playing in the quarterfinal on Day 11 of the World Snooker Championship at Crucible Theater in Sheffield. Professional-level playing is in Mr. Bean’s play.Credit...Tai Chengzhe/VCG, via Getty Images

Right.

A master of ceremonies stepped into the glare of the lights and bellowed: “It’s a huge afternoon in this arena steeped in history, a giant afternoon of drama!” Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” began to play. “This is always the music before a match; it’s in the play, too,” Mr. Bean whispered.

“The Nap” — the title refers to the surface of the snooker table, not a short sleep — won appreciative reviews at its 2016 premiere. “An ingenious plot and more one-liners than you’d find in a Bob Hope tribute act,” Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian.

The story’s protagonist is the young snooker star Dylan Spokes (played by Ben Schnetzer), with the requisite dystopian family (father a former jailbird, mother very dubious indeed). He is pressurized to “tank” (purposely lose) a frame, by Waxy Chuff, a transgender gangster (played by the transgender actress Alexandra Billings, known for “Transparent”) with natural instincts for both violence and malapropisms. (She has a “peanut analogy.”)

Mr. Bean grew up with snooker; his policeman father loved it and played the game at his social club in Hull, the northern English town, not far from Sheffield, where the family lived. “It was considered a respectable skill,” he said. “There is something cerebral about it; somehow if you are good at it you must be clever.” He added: “The bad news is that because it’s such a difficult game, I’ve never been any good at it. I still fantasize about having my own snooker table in a barn.” Of course, he added ironically, it would have to have “a bar at one end, and the girls in a Jacuzzi next door.” (He made quotation marks with his fingers: “#HeToo.”)

Image
James Corden, left, and Oliver Chris in Richard Bean’s play “One Man, Two Guvnors.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

We stopped talking to watch as Mr. Williams and Mr. Carter, dressed in bow ties and waistcoats, expressions impassive, faced off, after an initial session had ended at four frames each. Their body language was precise and stylized as they leaned across the table with straight backs and legs, sometimes using a half-butt or full-butt — longer cues — to reach balls on the opposite side of the table. Their immense skill and focus was unmistakable — precisely what worried Mr. Bean when Richard Wilson, an associate director at the Crucible, initially asked him to write a play about snooker.

In an interview in August, Mr. Bean re-enacted the encounter, dropping his voice into a gravelly burr: “Rrrrichard! What I need is a play about snookerrr!” Not seeing how the game could be convincingly portrayed, Mr. Bean said no. “A year later he invited me for a coffee and said the same thing,” Mr. Bean recounted. “I said no. The next year he invited me for a coffee, and said the same thing. I said, I’ll think about it.”

He came up with the idea of match-fixing as a plot point, since it partly solved the problem of an actor’s making bad shots. While he was writing the play, he said, a snooker and boxing promoter announced he was transitioning from male to female. “I was surprised by how supportive the boxing community was; it’s not known for its liberal politics,” he said.

At the same time, a close friend also transitioned from male to female. “So I had the thought of making Waxy a transgender character who wasn’t funny because she was transgender,” he said. “She’s just funny. And also a gangster.”

The second idea to solve the snooker-onstage quandary was to bring in a world-class professional snooker player as Dylan’s opponent. (In New York, it will be the 2018 United States champion, Ahmed Aly Elsayed.) “There are two snooker matches in the play,” Mr. Bean explained. “There is no cheating, no magnetic strips guiding the balls. In the second match, anyone can win, so the play actually has two possible endings.”

Most plays about sports, he said, keep the games offstage and focused on behind-the-scenes drama. “This felt exciting because I don’t know of any single play where you have really international-level playing onstage,” he said.

Like Jack O’Connell, his counterpart in Sheffield, Mr. Schnetzer has had to learn how to look like a professional player. He has been training intensively for the last several weeks with Mr. Elsayed, and watching snooker players and tutorials on YouTube.

“I played pool a little, and I figured it would be the same thing, but it is a really, really hard game,” Mr. Schnetzer said. “The way the players move, never looking at each other, the way the referees are behind them but never in the way; the whole thing has the tension of a penalty kick in football. It’s a very traumatic game!”

The dramatic challenge, Mr. Sullivan said, was how to stage the snooker games in a proscenium theater, as opposed to the in-the-round, more intimate setting of the Crucible. One solution has been to add large TV screens to show the matches close up; the other was to add a BBC commentator who describes the game. “It’s clever because it gives you the basics without the audience feeling it’s being taught,” he said.

Back at the Crucible, the second session (frames of over 100 points! I was an expert already) ended, with Mr. Williams slightly ahead (he would go on to win the championship), and we departed regretfully. “It can be exciting, can’t it?” Mr. Bean said over a post-match drink in a nearby pub, which tactlessly sported a pool table. He added that he wasn’t worried about American audiences understanding the intricacies of the game. “You’ll know who is winning or losing,” he said.

In a recent interview, he said he had been surprised by how many references and expressions he had needed to change, far more than for “One Man, Two Guvnors.”

“Comedy is dependent on a shared culture, and didn’t someone say that England and America are two countries divided by language?” he said ruefully. “At read-throughs, I had to find a translation for something about every 10 seconds.”

What was important for audiences to understand, he said, was not the minutiae of snooker rules or the nuances of social class in Sheffield. “You know from the play what the protagonist is up against, and that’s not just professional competition, it’s his family,” he said. “The play is about honesty, integrity, how Dylan rises above the dysfunction all around him. Sport has always been a metaphor for life; What did we do after mankind sorted out food, housing and sex, but sport — and theater.” He laughed. “I always imagine that God is looking down and thinking, WHAT are they doing?”

Follow Roslyn Sulcas on Twitter:@rsulcas.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Play About Snooker? You Bet Your Half-Butt. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT