Red Pitch – @sohoplace, London

Writer: Tyrell Williams

Director: Daniel Bailey

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death… I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

Those words, or a variation thereon, are attributed to former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly. Sometimes, they’re taken as an example of the all-consuming power of the sport to its players, coaches and fans, to the detriment of all else. At other times, it’s a tribute to the game’s power to shape and mould oneself.

Tyrell Williams imbues Red Pitch with that latter sentiment, opening in the West End following a transfer from the lower-league (but high-performing) Bush Theatre. While set on a football pitch and focusing on three teenage lads who dream of wowing professional scouts, the real focus is the young men they are about to become – how their friendships will adjust as they do so.

The Red Pitch of the title is the community football ground on which they incessantly train. Surrounded on four sides by Amelia Jane Harkin’s spare, in-the-round design with a red metal fence, the pitch is in a Southwark council estate targeted for regeneration, which means that families such as the boys’ will be moved out, and the spruced-up homes will not be for them.

For the three boys, this means that they are likely to be split up even if their footballing dreams don’t succeed. That fear is never far from the surface, especially for Francis Lovehall’s Omz, who also optimistically believes that the move will be good for the grandfather he cares for and who struggles with the stairs to their current fifth-floor flat.

Omz’s incessant bickering with Kedar Williams-Sterling’s Bilal, who very much feels like the alpha of the trio, and the quieter, more level-headed Joey (Emeka Sesay) effectively shows the depth of affection and the strength of the bond between the three boys. Effortlessly able to antagonise each other in the way only best friends can, the humour and heartbreak in Wiliams’s script bring us into their world with grace, and the three actors deliver career-defining performances.

As small details about their lives off the pitch emerge – Bilal is pushed by his father, who himself had aspirations in the professional game before his family came along; Joey’s family have more money than his friends’, and perhaps are the reason why he’s studying business as a fallback – director Daniel Bailey helps the actors layer their performances with finesse. Their words are often full of bravado, but their postures, hands often wringing inside their tracksuit tops, tell a competing narrative.

There’s also a sense that this trio, like so many men, has trouble communicating about anything meaningful. Their fears, dreams, and affection for each other are matters that can be batted away in place of practising a drop-shoulder move or taking shots at goal.

That conflict between what needs to be said, what can’t be, and how they are the same thing drives Williams’s script and the three magnificent performances at its heart. It’s also excellently choreographed, slow-motion football moves executed with a dancer’s grace and dances performed with delightfully youthful swagger. Events build toward a visceral fight sequence as the tensions between the trio reach boiling point. Fight director Kev McCurdy creates a tense, horrible believability to the explosive scene that underlines just how deeply we have come to empathise with the teenagers.

But friends find a way to get through. When apologies come, they are from the small actions that only people with years of history know to raise – the offer of a Twix means more than words ever can.

With his first full-length play, Tyrell Williams has created a tale of teenage friendship that transcends the pitch on which it plays out. The West End transfer is deserved and necessary. For these boys and those of us watching, it’s not really about football, but about life and death, from families to communities. And there’s nothing more important than that.

Continues until 4 May 2024