Girls With Balls

Back to Curve for yet another toe dip into the highly successful Inside Out Festival and Off The Fence's contribution to the festivities. While most of us are used to seeing productions staged in either the main auditorium or the studio, we sometimes forget that Curve was designed to be infinitely adaptable with various rehearsal spaces being available for use. Girls With Balls was snugly ensconced in Rehearsal Room 2, converted for the duration into an intimate performance studio, as we eavesdropped on two contrasting ladies' football teams and their respective coaches.

Local author and first time playwright Alison Dunne has crafted an, at times, hilarious play that tells the story of how the thriving women's football sport was killed stone dead by the FA after the Great War when it refused to let them use official pitches. This was supposedly so that the remaining men who came back from the trenches wouldn't be distracted from interest in the reignited men's game, abandoned during hostilities.

The small cast of four double up as both teams as we switch from 1971 and supposedly enlightened modern society and 1921, the between the wars struggle to retain the rights women gained during the conflict. With a one-liner strewn opening the story gradually gets darker as we empathise with the frustrations of the 1920's team fighting a chauvinistic Football Association and celebrate the bawdy bravado of the 1970's team as they embrace modern liberations. It is only in the final minutes, appropriately enough, that the seeming lack of progress is starkly illustrated. The modern women's liberal consumption of cigarettes and expletive laden dialogue starkly highlights what is both right and wrong with emancipation.

This production brings together two of Off The Fence's favoured actors, Becca Copper, last seen as Vesta Tilley in England Expects, and Jonny McClean, seen most recently in Clamber Up The Crucifix. The company is completed with Molly Waters and Jessica Noonan under the expert direction of Off The Fence's artistic director and Curve regular, Gary Phillpott. Plans are already under way for a national tour in 2016.

It has to be said that there is an awful lot of swearing and smoking from the 'modern' team but this does highlight the differences between the two eras. For this reason alone this is not something that children should be taken to see, especially when the final twist in the tale happens.

© Paul Towers 2/5/2015
First published in Western Gazette