Writer: Philip Catherwood
Director: Thea Mayeux
Despite the promotion of this play being centred on Gaelic football and its introduction onto Northern Irish playing fields, The Pitch tells a familiar story of division, that between Protestant and Catholic, between Republican and Unionist. Set a few years in the future, Northern Ireland is about to face a referendum on whether it should become part of a unified Ireland. However, these politics are played out on a micro-level on a football pitch in East Belfast rather than in the grand arena of Stormont.
Robbie and Deren meet on a soccer pitch, initially bonding through their rivalries. Robbie supports Man U, while Deren is a Man City fan. But when Deren confides that he plays Gaelic Football rather than soccer, their brief friendship shudders to a halt. 19-year-old Robbie is even more perturbed about the plans to install a GAA pitch, complete with H-shaped goals, next to his soccer pitch, where he plays regularly, hoping one day to become professional. East Belfast is a mainly Protestant area, and with GAA being played on his local field, Robbie feels his culture is under attack.
However, we discover that Robbie knows more about GAA than we first thought. He watches important matches on his phone and has clearly picked up some of the techniques in passing the ball. His sister Melissa, doing her GCSEs at school, starts playing GAA when it’s added to the curriculum. She’s good at it, too, and it doesn’t really bother her that it’s an Irish rather than British sport.
It’s fine for a play to pick sides, but Philip Catherwood’s play is a little too partisan in the way that it glosses over the Unionist concerns, here embodied in the figure of Robbie. It doesn’t help that Robbie and Melissa’s father, an organiser of protests against a United Ireland, is depicted as a bit of a bully, someone who Robbie finds it difficult to stand up to. We never hear about Deren’s parents and whether they are likewise militant in their beliefs.
The Pitch believes that the reunification of Ireland is an inevitability and implies that for most Northern Irish people, life would remain basically the same. Sure, there would be a new currency, but for Melissa, the only real change would come in the colour of the packets of Tayto crisps, a food item that she thought originated in Belfast rather than Dublin.
Melissa, in a strong performance by Dión Di Mai, may represent many young people, whether Catholic or Protestant, in Ireland, who don’t really care about sovereignty one way or another, as long as there’s peace and prosperity, But her views are rather undone by Catherwood’s insistence to write her as a silly female teenager hatching convoluted plans to snag the boy of her dreams. Politics is a man’s sport, the play seems to suggest.
As her elder brother, James Grimm gives an excellent performance as the young man caught between two cultures, one he hangs onto tightly, the other one he would like to explore if only he had the courage. Grimm captures, too, the no-man’s-land between childhood and adulthood, lost amid boyish dreams and a world of responsibility. In comparison, Jake Douglas’s more confident Deren is more of a cypher, holding on to a secret that Melissa can see only too plainly. The three actors are utterly convincing.
And their football moves are good, too, passing and throwing the ball at each other as they talk about the problems in Northern Ireland, and the choreographed pieces that start each scene are wonderful. The small Astroturfed stage, littered with autumn leaves, is enough to transport us to chilly mornings on Belfast playing fields.
Thea Mayeux directs at a steady pace, but while it’s good that the three characters are not shouting at each other, the show could do with some more energy at times. The conversations circle around the same topics with the result that The Pitch feels like an old-fashioned play which perhaps takes too long to get to its destination.
Runs until 21 September 2024
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