Football. The beautiful game. In the hands of writer Georgia Fitch and director Steve Marmion it has never looked uglier.
Between them the pair explore the seedier side of the national sport, the side we know from tabloid exposés and BBC investigations. This isn’t jumpers for goal posts, this is the world of shady foreign owners out for their own gain, manipulative agents out for their own gain, dodgy managers out for their own… you get the picture.
For anyone who has read a newspaper in the last decade the world depicted at Soho theatre is as easily recognisable as David Beckham’s billboard-monopolising face. Soho theatre, by the way, is not so recognisable, having been brilliantly transformed by Tom Piper into a mini football pitch, complete with dugouts, floodlights, advertising hoardings and turf, on which the action takes place.
The characters we see are personalities we know: the thuggish fan who lives for his club, the emerging star who gets too much too young and lets it go to his head, the unscrupulous woman making money from her flings with the stars. All are flawed, all are difficult to like. I’m a football fan, and even I began to wonder why I love the game.
At the centre of proceedings – the midfield general, if you will – is Katy Stephens’s hard-nosed, driven, manipulative agent Casey Layton, who returns to her local club, which has fallen on hard times, hoping to make it great again. She brings with her David Yip’s deceptive foreign businessman Frank Wong as the new cash-rich chairman. But there is more to her motives than helping her club; she has scores to settle.
Hidden amongst the depressing portrayal of the business of football is the story of a broken woman deeply affected by events of the past, desperately trying to claim her pound of flesh in a male-dominated world where everyone is trying to exploit someone else.
The production is as slick and flashy as José Mourinho in a Gucci suit, with the attention to detail of Sir Alex Ferguson at his very best – there is even an announcer playing classic football tunes and half time pies – but it feels a lot like watching Arsenal; it all looks very good, with its quick interchanges and overlapping speech flying around like short, sharp passes, but it lacks a little bit of steel running through its core.
MA