‘Dear England was good, but our play is better’: the must-see show tackling race and football
Earlier this year the BBC announced a forthcoming adaptation of Dear England, James Graham’s Olivier-nominated hit play about Gareth Southgate’s revolutionary tenure of the England football team. Yet they would have done just as well to have looked at Tyrell Williams’s 2022 debut play, Red Pitch, a nimble three-hander about three south London hopefuls dreaming of success in the Queens Park Rangers trials, which this week transfers to the West End.
It’s a more intimate, very different drama about the beautiful game, but in its way just as insightful and arguably more thought-provoking on the all consuming importance of football in the lives of young men. What’s more, it features a dazzling young cast, including Kedar Williams-Stirling, the smooth but conflicted Jackson in Netflix’s randy YA comedy Sex Education.
“Everyone is talking about the number of plays featuring celebrities in the West End,” says producer Nica Burns, who picked up Red Pitch after it sold out two runs at the Bush theatre; the play has also won a trophy cabinet’s worth of awards. “But there is also room there for a play like this, led by a trio of outstanding actors who are on their way to be the next big stars.”
This trio, all in their 20s, cut a relaxed pose when we meet at Soho Place during a break in rehearsals. All three, including Francis Lovehall and Emeka Sesay, have been with Red Pitch since it premiered, and Lovehall even played as a teenager on the concrete football pitch in the Aylesbury estate in Elephant and Castle where the play is set, as did the playwright, Tyrell Williams, whose 2015 spoof comedy #HoodDocumentary became a YouTube hit. The setting is significant: Tony Blair gave his first speech as Prime Minister at Aylesbury, declaring it to be an example of the catastrophic failures in post-war planning. The estate became the focus of a flagship regeneration programme.
Yet for the three teenagers in the play, who, when not talking about girls, dream of glory, that regeneration also means the loss of their community: that football pitch is now a block of flats. “People assume the play is all about football,” says Lovehall. “Ten minutes in and they realise it’s about all sorts of things.” Perhaps most of all, it’s about the agonising fragility of dreams. “Come the end, and grown men in the audience are crying,” Lovehall adds. “They go – ‘but that was me, that was me!’”
Sesay and Lovehall were once those young boys too, both nurturing hopes of success on the pitch. Both grew up in London (although Lovehall, who was born in Jamaica, returned to Kingston between the ages of seven and 13) and both trialled for professional clubs. Lovehall, who used to play football barefoot in Jamaica, using juice cartons for the ball and – potentially disastrously – the goal posts, became a member of Brentford Academy in his early teens.
Yet he began to find the hothouse environment overwhelming and at the age of 17, he dropped out and went back to college. “I thought it was time I did something normal, like talk to the opposite sex.” He’d always loved acting, and was encouraged to apply to RADA, “even though I knew nothing about it. I assumed it was full of people dressed in black tights”. He graduated in 2019.
Sesay’s journey has been more difficult. As a child he spent time in and out of care homes and lost his brother to gang violence before being reunited with his mother in his early teens. A highly promising footballer, he trialled with Marseille and later Birmingham City, but struggled to return to the game following an injury. “I was lost for many years,” he says. “Football had given me stability but if you train at that level, there is no preparation for what happens after it stops.” He eventually studied engineering at Southwark College but after bunking off a lesson, he found himself in the performing arts department and, for want of anything better to do, tried on a couple of costumes.
It ignited something, and he switched courses to drama. “Although I pretended to my mum that I was still doing engineering. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I had dropped out.” She finally accepted her son’s choice of career when he stepped in while still a student to play the voice of the Ghost in a Young Vic production of Hamlet starring Michael Sheen, in 2011. “I knew I could do anything after doing that,” he says. He’s since had parts in Top Boy and Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield. “But football is still sacred to me. Each time I do this play I wonder ‘what if?’.”
Williams-Stirling, the most quietly assured of the three, grew up in Croydon and was nine when he watched a TV documentary about the Sylvia Young School. His mum encouraged him to apply and within his first year he landed a McDonald’s advert and then a part in the Lion King.
On graduating from the Italia Conti academy he had parts in a couple of small films before being cast in Sex Education in 2018. To this day he follows football avidly. “Football provides a space where there is less judgement on men,” he says. “You can express things [while watching it] that you can’t express anywhere else. You can cry and no one thinks you are less than a man.”
Masculinity and mental health is currently a hot topic in the theatre. Have they seen Dear England, which examines the psychological support Southgate introduced to the dressing room? Only Sesay nods his head. “It was alright. It’s good at showing how hard football is mentally. [In my experience] no one is there to give you therapy or help you. There have been suicide attempts when people lose their position [in a club] when they are 19. I was more interested in the racial abuse [Jadon] Sancho, [Marcus] Rashford and [Bukayo] Saka got when they missed the penalties, but it was only a small bit in the play. Red Pitch is better.”
Do they think the conversation around masculinity – and particularly black masculinity – is starting to shift? After all, Red Pitch follows Ryan Calais Cameron’s smash hit play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy – about six black men candidly discussing how they feel in a white majority culture – into the West End. “I don’t speak for all black men,” says Lovehall. “But I don’t feel as though the world doesn’t know what black men think about the world in which they live. The idea of seeing a black boy in a hoodie and assuming he is up to no good – we’ve been having conversations about this for ages. What is new is the way they are presented, both in Black Boys and in Red Pitch. It’s beautiful.”
The three are palpably at ease with each other – affectionately arguing over where French World Cup hero Kylian Mbappé should go after his contract ends with Paris Saint Germain – as befits a play that is above all about the friendship between three young men. “There are very few stories about black people being normal, just living their life,” says Williams-Stirling. “But change is happening. We are it. And if a teacher saw this play and the next time they see black boys playing football outside; if this play can make them question who they think those boys are, then it’s done its job.”
Red Pitch is at Soho Place until May 4 sohoplace.org
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