This lively play from the November Theatre company is a captivating examination of the queer experience via football, a sport that is frequently thrown into the spotlight thanks to FIFA’s crummy LGBTQ+ rights record.
Soul-searching, funny, and infectiously upbeat, ‘Pitch’ follows the experiences of five characters who are all part of Muddy Studs, a queer-identifying grassroots football team based in London. We’re guided through each player’s relationship to the game through flashbacks and team practice sessions, and we soon learn their motivations for joining aren’t quite as simple as playing purely ‘for fitness, love of the sport and the pub’. One player retired from his professional career because he was called a ‘fag’ in the changing rooms, a loved-up couple met while watching a match at the pub, and another – the newcomer, Bill – learnt to love the game again after transitioning to a man.
Snippets of audio storytelling, lip-synced by the cast, are interspersed throughout, in segments that resemble a strange sort of pub-quiz-slash-documentary collage. Presumably, it’s to provide some context about how the largely heteronormative sport has been navigated by the queer community, but it feels muddled rather than informative and distracted from the self-reflective journeys of the characters. It confuses the storytelling and dilutes the crux of the play’s message – which is a shame, since it should have been especially poignant with the women’s World Cup playing out Down Under.
That said, the stage design and choreography is very slick and excellent fun to watch: the cast use chalk to draw pitch lines on the floor, pub benches are turned into cones for dribbling drills in scene transitions, etcetera. An opening sequence set to ’90s club hit turned football anthem ‘Freed from Desire’ is particularly enjoyable and had the audience on board from the get-go. By the time the Studs play out their match against abstract nemesis team the Holloway Heroes, everyone is on the edge of their seats, waving imaginary flags, rooting for them.
I wanted to adore ‘Pitch’, but the writing was trying to do too much at once and the over-ambition distracted from some ferocious acting and creative choreography. It might have succeeded in its heart-warming portrayal of allyship and community – as a whole, though, the ball didn’t quite cross the line.