BWW Reviews: BILLY THE KID, The Unicorn Theatre, October 8 2011

With its stage transformed into typically scrubby London parkland, kids from the audience invited to take a few pot shots at a goal painted on to a brick wall and the echoing of the low rumble of a football crowd rolling around the auditorium, Tony Graham's last show for the Unicorn has a very football feel to it.

Dazzling though many of his 32 shows for the Unicorn have been, I was filled with foreboding as I doubted that Mr Graham, as adaptor and director of Michael Morpurgo's book, could capture football on stage (why are sports so very difficult to bring to the theatre?).

Fortunately, football in general and Chelsea in particular are only the hooks on which hangs a tale of inter-generational understanding and the hideous impact of war. (And, it should be said, the little football we saw was done very well indeed!)

Sam (Sam Donovan) is a regular at Stamford Bridge and dreams of a place in the Chelsea first team, full of what will come his way if he succeeds with his trial for the Academy side. Billy (Dudley Sutton) is his ageing uncle, who finds refuge in the bottle after a life that, at first, appears to have been wasted. As Sam sings the praises of today's Stamford Bridge heroes and ridicules old football's long shorts and unfashionably nicknamed players, Billy bridles at the young buck.

Slowly the old man reveals his story to the younger, telling of its beginning as an eight-year-old in that same park. What emerges is a tale of chances, friends and families lost to war, of Sam's dream realised by Billy (all too briefly) and, ultimately, of recognition and pride in what Billy had achieved all those years ago.

At 78 years of age, Dudley Sutton needs no make-up to play the old man and delivers a lovely performance, full of charisma, but never toppling over into sentimentality. Parents in the audience will recognise him from more telly and film work than probably even he can remember and all that craft is on show as scenes from Billy's past are played out. In no way overawed, Sam Donovan is excellent in all the roles that play off Billy, especially as a Liverpool policeman whom I'm sure I've met many times in the past.

The show is billed as suitable for 8+, but any kids up to the age of 16 will appreciate the drama and learn about a past in which footballers were ordinary young men called upon to undertake extraordinary acts in a conflict with an existential threat. Tony Graham hands over to Purni Morell after 14 years with a sign-off production that challenges the Unicorn's new management to maintain its ambition, its belief that children's attention spans are as long today as ever they were and its unique place in London Theatre - a challenge every bit as demanding as that facing Chelsea's new manager, Andre Villas-Boas, a few miles upstream.  

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