Writer: Sarah Louise Hill
Director: Emma Nihill Alcorta
Camilla Cole is a professional footballer and corporate recruiter. With a well-paid job and contract with a top football club, she seems to be living the dream. But she’s not happy. The Glory Days is a funny, clever and thoughtful play about the search for contentment and the meaning of life. When her clueless boss books a work social in a crowded pub on the night of the Euro semi-finals, Cole finds herself forced to look back on her life and think about her love of football.
Award-winning actor and writer Sarah Louise Hill has herself played Division 1 football while studying for a degree in America and played in the Women’s Super League, so this excellent one-woman play presumably has some biographical elements. The Glory Days, which premiered in April 2026, is Hill’s first solo show. She shifts chameleonically between roles: her boss (“Watch out for the gilet!”), her variously sweet or deluded clients (“I think I’m a problem-solver”), the Australian nurse at her granddad’s care home (“Sorry to interrupt the DMC: deep, meaningful conversation”). She even plays her own boyfriend and childhood sweetheart Jimmy/James (“Can I get you a beveragino?”), switching places and accents in quick-fire conversations and a long, hilarious dance-floor smooch.
Besides metamorphosing brilliantly into half a dozen different characters, Hill also plays the young irrepressible Cammy Cole, kicking a ball in her granddad’s back garden. Blazer on and she’s a high-flying corporate drone; blazer off reveals a classic blue three-lions shirt from the 1990 World Cup and she’s a girl again, booting the football into a long-suffering greenhouse.
This pacy and engaging comedy, well-directed by Emma Nihill Alcorta, tackles deeper questions about ambition, perspective, and the nature of fulfilment. The derisory levels of pay in women’s football mean there’s no question of Cole giving up the day job, leaving her with no time outside work and “play”.
There are moments that could be trimmed or tightened slightly, when the show’s momentum could be speeded up even further, but this energetic hour-or-so rarely flags. Hill (to coin her own phrase) “leaves it all on the pitch”. She encourages the audience to become football fans, cheering from the stands or watching in the pub, to react to Cole’s dilemmas, chant “Cammy, Cammy” as she challenges Jimmy to a keepy-uppy contest, and sing along as she plays a medley of hits on the cornet. The Glory Days is a terrific tour-de-force from a talented performer.
Reviewed on 28 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
