Review: RED PITCH, @sohoplace

What is it about football that makes for good theatre? Maybe it’s the universal appeal: even the least zealous non-follower is struck with a tinge of fist-shaking pride whenever England triumph in an international game. For writer Tyrell Williams it’s the ready-made fusion of struggle and emotion, the knife edge drama of a last-minute goal, of winners and losers, of it all to play even as the clock counts down. Red Pitch captures exactly that, now triumphantly promoted up a league to the West End after two acclaimed runs at the Bush Theatre.

Set around a South London football pitch where three black teenagers congregate to kickabout, Williams’ deft brush strokes paint a cosy portrait of adolescent anxiety. They spar with slap-happy insults and boyish banter, arms waving like posing peacocks.

Masculine vulnerability and anxiety at entering a changing world lingers beneath the bravado. The area is being gentrified. Looming drilling, roaring trucks, and the crashes of a building site creep ever nearer - as do the crossroads the three must navigate as they grow up.  

Daniel Bailey’s production glistens with the spectacle of the teenagers’ dreams.  Footballing stardom is lucidly enacted in expressionistic vignettes. Accentuated by Ali Hunter’s lighting design, sparkles of paparazzi flashes evoke the fantasy of scoring a winning goal only for the lights to return them to the real world and to the problems that anchor them.

But it’s the cosy intimacy where the play excels. It’s the small idiosyncrasies, the way Francis Lovehall’s fraught Omz skittishly fiddles with his shirt, his eyes whirring above him searching for an escape route when confronted with hardship, that pumps Red Pitch’s beating heart. In the round and bigger than the Bush Theatre, Soho Place is perfectly equipped to render each gesture with delicate love.

No doubt every critic and their mother will draw parallels to James Graham’s Dear England, the other football play to lumber into the West End in recent months. As for my take, Red Pitch is a vital counterpoint to Graham’s big blokey saga of the England team; it reminds us that the emotions run just as high at a Sunday League game in Walworth as they do at Wembley cup finals: the universal drama of sport is just as like those enacted on stage. But where one involves budgets, planning, and endless hours of manpower, the other takes a ball and a few pairs of legs to kick it around.

Permit me one criticism. Williams plays a safe game when it comes to the drama’s trajectory which unravels in a neatly predictable pattern. Maybe this is harsh. There’s nothing wrong with a straightforward coming of age story masterfully rendered with bucket loads of charm, and although an experienced writer, it is his first play. With Red Pitch’s success Williams will have some room to stretch his theatrical muscles. The game’s not over yet.

Red Pitch plays at Soho Place until 4 May

Photo credit: Helen Murray