SHOOT, SCORE, SPARK!
This is the year of football plays. First Dear England at the Olivier, now the women’s turn on another stage, out East a bit. Here’s another neon strip light and a lone football waiting on a big stage, smoky mist rising around it to denote a century’s span. Amanda Whittington’s play takes on the true story of women’s football teams in WW1, and the particular invincibility of the Sterling Ladies – the Dagenham Invincibles, fitly celebrated now right at home in Essex. A factory side, put together by girls from the machine-room and Assembly for sheer love of playing, stormed through the 1917 and 1918 seasons: beating MArconi and Rothmans, Harrods and the Laundry Girls, Woolwich Arsenal, all of them. But not enough of us know – though in this Lioness year we should – there even was such a league, and such an enthusiasm, a hundred years ago.
In 1921, of course, the FA took fright and banned women from all its grounds for fifty years, on the grounds that the game was unsuitable for women and that “medical advice” was against the jerking movement of the kick. It was a characteristic part of the prevailing male panic when the soldiers came home to find women who had been “munitionettes”, land girls or factory hands who, as one player puts it here , “did men’s jobs, for men’s hours” (though not for men’s pay) and flourished and still wanted to play hard.
That FA ban crippled the sport, though a nice little exhibition in the foyer also shows some later team memorabilia: I found those display cases remarkably moving, the small battered boots and a great heavy leather old-style football. So I was very much primed to applaud the play, from the mournful opening “Keep the home fires burning” and the sight of tough young women in factory snoods or bicycling breeches tramping home from a twelve hour shift, submissive to a patriarchal Dad rebuking them for lipstick but soon barracking “Cholly” from the factory to train them.
Whittington, however, constantly slows the play down by weaving the story of the Invincibles together with that of a fictional 2023 teenage player , sulkily recovering from injury and following the World Cup. Which is an obvious and good parallel, except that neither Maya or the mother she complains to are particularly engaging or full characters. We get rather too much use of commentary from this year’s matches, with the pair of them sitting downstage excitedly following it, and there’s no tension since we’ve known the result for weeks. So in James Grieve’s production the excitement of the modern bits doesn’t rise, and there are too many of them (I notice that the early press releases suggested it was ten minutes shorter, and it should be). Where it does rise is whenever we see the 2017 girls, tough and draggled, put through “Swedish drill” exercises, excited by ideas of strategic teamwork and keeping possession (nice choreographed play by Lucie Pankhurst). There’s a sudden sharp drama in Nell, the poorest and a lodger, suffering dangerous blisters (sepsis could kill fast) and being lent the absent soldier son’s too-big boots, to the father’s fury. Every kind of symbolism there. Drama too in a death and a funeral and a moment of wondering whether it is a “retribution” for women taking men’s roles. And there’s triumph in the cry of “I”m not a man when I play, I”m not a girl – I am a spark, a fire..!”.
So for all the longueurs of the flat modern bits, I was glad to have gone to see it on its home turf. And to be reminded, as if we need it after Rubiales, that the ability to see a woman as a skilled footballer rather than a kissable , biddable dummy is work still in progress.
Queens-theatre.co.uk To 23 sept
Then New Wolsey, Ipswich. Wolseytheatre.co.uk 26-30 Sept
theatreCat 