Review: RED PITCH, Bush Theatre

Hands are often wrung over the difficulties of getting young people into theatre when the answer is staring us in the face - put on shows that they want to see. (Okay, that's a little too glib, but it's the best, indeed the only, starting point). Tyrell Williams' Red Pitch is a play that young audiences will want to see.

If that makes the production sound a bit BBC Three, in some ways it is, but it's a strong piece of comedy-drama that stands above any temptation to pigeonhole its appeal. It's an example, and there aren't enough of them, of a play that concerns itself with today, catching it as the calendar charges forwards.

Bils, Omz and Joey are three lads peering into the misty opportunities of adulthood, still just over the horizon. They play red pitch, pick-up football in a railed off compound surrounded by the construction work that is replacing their estate's blocks with gentrified housing, replacing Morley's with Costa, replacing black teenage kids with white young adults.

They dream of their upcoming trial for Queen's Park Rangers, but they worry about what will happen if they don't make it, what will happen to their friendship when their families are re-housed as the blocks are demolished and what will happen to their likes-count on Insta.

Williams' sharpened writing gets full value from three outstanding performances. Kedar Williams-Stirling vests Bils with a bit of a swagger, a keen intelligence and just enough fragility to let us know that he knows that he'll never live up to his father's hopes. Emeka Sesay is a natural comic actor, a compelling physical presence as Joey, a lad whose self-confidence is rooted in stability at home - it's easier to roll with the punches when you've plenty of armour. Francis Lovehall carries much of the play's emotional punch as Omz, worrying (with some justification) about his dementia-afflicted grandfather and his little brother, Raheem. Omz clings to the ground on which he stands, even as the bulldozers are sweeping it from under his feet.

Staged in the round, Daniel Bailey directs on fast-forward, provoking gales of laughter and sighs of sadness in the house and that ephemeral but unmistakable quality of connection across the fourth wall. If the play is a little too bounded by the conventions of the 'coming of age' genre, it's also bold in depicting lives as lived today.

I reflected on the fact that boldness should be the quality required to stage such a show when waiting for my bus on Shepherd's Bush Green. Theatre's audiences of the future were all around me and it seemed obvious that more plays should be staged by them and for them. And I promise you that some 58 year-old white men will enjoy them just as much as those kids also waiting for the 220.

Red Pitch is at the Bush Theatre until 26 March

Photo Craig Fuller

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