The heart of a friendship
There’s a wealth of historical detail in this real underdog sporting yarn about the early days of the FA Cup. Set in the 1870s, when football was still the province of the gentry (the game owes a lot to Eton, after all) it charts the formation of a team of millworkers from Darwen in Lancashire who go on to play The Old Etonians in a cup tie.
The cast of four all favour the somewhat emphatic style of performance familiar to regular viewers of primetime ITV period dramas but to criticise it as broad would be to miss the point – any sporting story is fuelled by its cast’s energy. To single anyone out seems unfair but Eve Pearson-wright (Lucy) and Neil Andrew as striker Robert “Bobby” Kirkham deserve to split the Man of the Match award by virtue of writing the play and preserving a sweet chunk of sporting history.
While it’s never po-faced, you do wonder what Michael Palin or even Alan Bennett could have brought to this material. A touch more wit in the script may help this show find the larger audience the story deserves. Darwen FC was dissolved in 2009 but its legacy deserves to live on.
First Light
Whitespace 76 (Venue 375) Around a stone cairn, where in times past people would visit to ‘commune’ with the rock gods, three groups meet to discuss love and sex: whether love is based on trust or fear; who is responsible for staying safe; the psychological roots of spanking. Seemingly composed largely of improvisatory material, it’s a slog of repetitious conversations and pointless meanderings, delivered (in several cases) unconvincingly.
Fag/stag
Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61)
Corgan (Chris Isaacs) and Jimmy (Jeffrey Jay Fowler) are best mates, both of whom once loved mutual friend Tamara – in Jimmy’s case, years before he realised he was gay. Tamara’s marriage to interloper Jack (described by both men as having a “piss-weak handshake”) is on the horizon, and we hear tales of the lads’ escapades in the weeks leading up to the big day.
This no-frills two-hander is not quite what you might expect from Perth theatre company The Last Great Hunt – their 2011 Fringe sensation, The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, was a technical marvel, and even actioncomedy Bruce and globetrotting yarn The Great Ridolphi (both being staged at this year’s festival) have some bells and whistles attached. Fag/stag simply has two blokes, sitting on chairs, talking about their feelings – or more accurately, not talking about their feelings.
Fowler and Isaacs’ script – along with their understated performances and fluent rapport – capture the oblique way men interact with one another: very rarely saying exactly what’s on their minds, instead encoding messages to each other in rolled-up cigarettes, shared beers and Donkey Kong sessions.
The centrepiece of this complex inarticulacy is a night out with Corgan’s ‘straight mates’ – while Corgan feels perfectly secure in hanging out with Jimmy on a one-to-one basis, there’s a shift in dynamic as soon as his non-gay peers are introduced: both he and Jimmy struggle to share the same platonic intimacy in a larger group of men, and end up acting out as a result.
The show’s treatment of subjective truth is perhaps less unique, but no less well observed; by the end, you’ve learned that each storyteller has their own version of events, and it’s up to you to decide which – if any – has any relation to what really happened.