Red Pitch: this dynamic football drama is a contemporary triumph
It’s an inconvenient truth for anyone over 30 that British theatre is often at its most dynamic when it foregrounds the experience of youth. Whether it’s Look Back in Anger (which made a national talking-point of the ‘angry young man’), A Taste of Honey or Beautiful Thing, the stage flowers into life when the young are on it, telling it like it is.
The West End has just received two euphoric injections of hormonal energy. Demand is so high to see Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys..., that its run at the Garrick has been extended and now @sohoplace, the funkiest new theatre in town, is sure to pack them in for Tyrell Williams’ award-winning Red Pitch. His play, first seen at the Bush in 2022, has rightly transferred.
Both works foreground and detail the lives of black British male youth with a streetwise confidence and winning grasp of comic value. There’s no lecturing or hectoring in either – here, you learn more in 90 minutes about modern London than you might do in a month of newspaper columns. Daniel Bailey’s pulsing production fits snugly in the venue’s in-the-round configuration, the audience bearing down on a south London housing estate football playing-area, fondly known as ‘red pitch’. In this railed-off haven, three teen pals – Bilal, Joey and Omz – work up their ball skills as they dream, to adrenal urban sounds, of being talent-spotted by a big club.
If there’s an immediate minor adjustment to be made as you watch, with the actors kicking around very close to the front-rows, it’s that the cast are in their 20s and so past the first flush of adolescence, signposted in the script by a lot of gaucheness, especially about girls. It’s no great matter, though; bodies do have a tendency to bulk up with boyish psyches still whirring inside the imposing figures of grown men. And the piece really puts the team through their paces, requiring not just sporting skills and lithe athleticism but a sure-footed sense of when to throw away a line so that it travels at the speed of everyday banter, and when to indicate, in just a telling glance, a world of feeling.
Hats off then to Kedar Williams-Stirling (of Sex Education fame), Emeka Sesay and Francis Lovehall, playing Bilal, Joey and Omz, and now so acquainted with the roles and each other, that they attain a 360 degree authenticity. At first, as you acclimatise to the slang, you think the trio are just going to bicker, brag and bang on about the beautiful game. But as personal stories come to the fore, particularly Omz’s carer difficulties with his grandfather, it becomes clear that the chat – intercut by physically stylised fantasies of glory – is partly a deflection from mounting pressure. This benign meeting-spot is beset by encroaching, clanking gentrification and, following a Queens Park Rangers trial, a bitterly divisive sense of diverging futures.
The uninitiated might need a glossary of terms, but no one, surely, will need coaching in acclaiming a feel-good, emotionally impactful and richly contemporary triumph.
Until May 4. Tickets: sohoplace.org
