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CRICKET,
CRICKET,
If you’d recently strayed on to Stage C at Shepperton Studios you might have been forgiven for thinking you were some- where deep in suburban South London. On a stunning set exquisitely detailing parallel gardens behind a pair of small ter- raced houses, there’s a large cricket net on one of the well-tended lawns. It’s all any self-respecting disciple of the ‘summer game’ can do to resist having a quick bowl.
And the cricketing motif continues with a glance at the cast list which along with all the fictional characters also reveals the names of legendary West Indian Test players like Frank Worrell and Gary Sobers not to mention, from a much earlier era, the massively bearded English all-rounder WG Grace.
Denis Compton, the late, great Brylceemed batting idol of the 40s and 50s, would ideally have been there too among an already eclectic dramatis personae including ‘Skinny Woman’ and ‘Rabbi’. But, up to the
last week of shooting, a look-alike actor hadn’t yet been found to direc- tor Paul Morrison’s satisfaction.
Compton is clearly rather a key chap in Morrison’s memory. They went to the same infants’ school – though not at the same time, of course – in North London and when Compton later found fame playing cricket for Middlesex and football for Arsenal, young Morrison duly became a fan of both clubs.
But before you get the idea that Wondrous Oblivion is merely some kind of rose-tinted sporting biopic, cricket is only part of the picture. In fact the ‘Rabbi’ proves almost as significant as those denizens of flannelled foolery.
For Wondrous Oblivion turns out also to be, albeit in a more deliberate- ly uplifting and, yes, feelgood way the latest encounter between Morrison and aspects of Jewishness.
Morrison, long an acclaimed drama-documentary maker with films on art and the nuclear industry, has also, among many others, made a
number of documentaries with a Jewish theme. These include From Bitter Earth, about drawings and paintings created during World War Two in concentration camps and ghettos, and A Sense Of Belonging, a series about the dilemmas of British Jewish identity.
When he eventually made his drama feature debut in 1998 it was with the splendid Solomon & Gaenor, which traced the star-crossed romance between a Jewish boy and a Chapel girl in the Welsh Valleys of 1911. The film, also shot in Welsh, received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Picture.
A comedy-drama, Wondrous Oblivion – which re-unites Morrison with DP Nina Kellgren BSC who also shot Solomon & Gaenor – is also a period piece, set this time at the turn of the Sixties. It follows the fortunes of a cricket-mad Jewish youngster David (Sam Smith) whose life – not to men- tion the lives of his family and neigh- bours – is turned upside down when a
Jamaican couple and their children move in next door.
So is Morrison’s screenplay autobi- ographical? “Not really,” he smiled, “I was never a cricket fanatic but I did grow up in this period. We didn’t have a West Indian family living next door but I certainly remember when the first West Indian family moved next door to my grandmother in Cricklewood and what a shock that was for her.
“This started with the idea of a kid who loved cricket but wasn’t any good at it. He’s teased at school but remains enthusiastic whatever the odds. I did- n’t choose cricket as some sort of metaphor although I happen to think it’s a great game, rich in all its reso- nances. My working principle in shoot- ing the film was not to have a single cricket shot that didn’t also mean something else in terms of the charac- ter development in the drama, or what was happening between the people.”
“The Jews in this story are caught betwixt and between and have eventu-
LOVELY CRICKET
LOVELY CRICKET
Photos top and far right: Director Paul Morrison; shooting outdoors on Wondrous Oblivion; above centre: Delroy Lindo and his family; Emily Woof and Sam Smith (Photos by Simon Mein)
EXPOSURE • 10 & 11
in production