The Ladies Football Club review – squad of 11 salute Sheffield’s pioneering players | OneFootball

The rise of interest in women’s football continues off the pitch in this play by Stefano Massini, adapted for Sheffield Theatres by Tim Firth. Like Amanda Whittington’s The Invincibles and Offside by Sabrina Mahfouz and Hollie McNish, The Ladies Football Club recounts the striking story of the game’s development during the first world war. While the men were away fighting, women took up their places in the factory and on the football field – before being rudely booted out of both after peace returned.

This fictionalisation of that history is set on local turf, following the football-playing female munitions workers of Sheffield. The storytelling in Elizabeth Newman’s production has the pacy, frenetic rhythm of a match, passing rapidly back and forth between the dynamic 11-strong ensemble. It’s matched by Scott Graham’s movement direction, which strings together sequences of exaggerated lunges, kicks and headers, evoking the game without ever attempting to realistically replicate it on stage. This all makes for a relentless forward momentum, as the team move swiftly from lunchtime kickabouts to their first match to playing in front of tens of thousands in London.

But there are also some fumbled kicks and abrupt tackles in the storytelling. The script has a tendency to swerve quickly from one idea or exchange to the next, making the narrative feel scattered. Likewise, the driving energy of Newman’s direction sometimes sacrifices clarity. And with so many characters to juggle, each player becomes reduced to a single defining trait: the socialist one, the softly spoken one, the one who’s weirdly obsessed with Joan of Arc. While these characteristics allow for moments of comedy, they also risk undermining the women’s struggle to be seen as multidimensional individuals.

At one point, one of the characters uses the beautiful game as an analogy for oppression: you get given your position on the field and you’re stuck with it. The Ladies Football Club is most stirring when it challenges that idea, drawing a line from the spirit and defiance of these women more than a century ago to the triumphs of their Lionesses successors today.

• At Crucible theatre, Sheffield, until 28 March

Header image: [Photograph: Johan Persson]