The premise of Playing Away is as simple as its effects are complex: a rural English village invites a West Indian black cricket team from London’s Brixton section for a weekend match, and the encounter proves to be rather comical.

"Obviously, the possibilities, both comic and serious, in this cultural exchange are endless, and the film makers seem not to have missed any of them. Playing Away however, is more modest than trenchant. Don’t expect the energy or sharp cutting edge of a Sammy and Rosie Get laid or a My Beautiful Laundrette but rather the bemused detachment of a vintage Ealing comedy.

Not surprisingly, there’s wariness on both sides. But Willie Boy (Norman Beaton), the proud, wryly philosophical captain of the Conquistadors, is intent on accepting the invitation. Meanwhile, the captain of the Sneddington Cricket Club, the innocent but overweeningly self-satisfied Derek (Nicholas Farell), is confident of a handy Sunday afternoon victory.

From the moment the visitors are greeted with the strains of “Jamaica Farewell,” the film is crammed with incidents. For openers Willie Boy strikes up an acquaintance with an elderly ex-colonial (Robert Urquhart) who tends to read much into the match while a mini-skirted local tart (Elizabeth Anson) boldly sets her mark for Errol (Gary Beadle), one of the youngest and huskiest of the Conquistadors.

The most uncomfortable of the Conquistadors is Jeff (Trevor Thomas), a suave black urban professional who feels at home with neither the blacks nor the whites-but does a strike a spark with Derek’s bored, neglected wife (Shelia Ruskin).

For all the film’s abundant humor, Ove, said to be Britain’s first black film maker, and the Oxford-educated Phillips, never let us forget that racial tensions lurk beneath the occasion’s sure of good will. Indeed, some local punks are ever-threatening to turn ugly. The film makers, however, are determined to be good sports-even as they reveal the Sneddington Cricket Club surprised to discover how hard that can be." -- Los Angeles Times

|Trinidad-Tobago/UK|1986|100 mins|comedy|English|Horace Ove, dir.|

“Ove’s second feature takes up the myth of the sport of cricket and the black man and turns it into a humorous, pointed metaphor for what he calls “the slave beating the master at his own game.” -- City Limits Magazine