REVIEW: The Bench, Gala Durham and touring
Jeff Brown's winning play gets the crowd on its side
It’s a big weekend for football, with Sunderland and Newcastle both facing a crucial, season-defining match and transfer wheeler dealing about to kick off. But when isn’t it?
Do agents like Mike, smoothing the path for the sport’s human commodities as they coin it in, ever put down their phones?
Do the fans, addicted to the heady brew of ‘Super Sunday’ style TV coverage, ever lay their passion aside?
Mike will tell you. Any footballer’s agent would tell you. Nah… course not. Deals can be struck all year round, 24/7.
And now comes Jeff Brown’s timely reminder that in life, as in football, there are winners and losers and that in a game where emotions run high there’s going to be collateral damage.
In a ‘What if?’ kind of play, a writer with a background in sports journalism exposes the ugly side of the ‘beautiful’ game in the most charming way.
What if a young single mum (cash-strapped, burdened with caring responsibilities) met a young Premier League footballer (money to burn, or give away) on a park bench?
It’s a sweet scenario, a bit of a fairy story really, but done so well that you’ll be sucked in – as the audience was on the night I saw it at the Gala (not the press/invited guest night, so a real audience).
As with a football crowd, you can ‘read’ an audience, sense when silences turn from wary testing-the-water to pure absorption. You didn’t have to sense the muttered expressions of appreciation at the interval. They were clear and obvious.
Football’s a juggernaut but here’s a chance to focus on its intimate, behind-the-scenes moments.
There are winning performances from a cast of five with Jason Njoroge and Hannah Marie Davis reprising their roles from an earlier production of the play which had a short (but well-received) run in South Shields in 2023.
They are Adi, the footballer born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo but brought up in France, and Vicky who has had to give up her job to care for her baby and ailing mum.
They’re from different worlds, as Vicky repeatedly points out. And not just geographically. Loose change for him is food on the table for her and the bairn.
Circumstances both pull them together and keep them apart. Adi, his matchday appearances mostly confined to the substitutes’ bench, suffers abhorrent racial abuse. Vicky has her benefits stopped.
She, at least, has a proper friend, Abigail Lawson’s funny and irrepressibly chirpy hairdresser ‘Becs’ who can’t bear to see Vicky put principles ahead of potential riches.
Adi has to suffer Mike ruling his life to their supposed mutual advantage, offering cars and girls he doesn’t want. David Nellist supressing his patent niceness as an unprincipled Cockney geezer is one of the evening’s many joys.
Multi-tasking Dan Howe, meanwhile, gives us the voice of the fans, which it has to be said isn’t always pretty.
Serious issues are dealt with effectively but lightly, the laughter genuine but occasionally bitter-sweet. The humanity of the play shines most brightly in one of the tender concluding scenes when Adi and Vicky bare their souls. It’s deeply moving and thought-provoking.
Director Olivia Millar-Ross and her cast have conjured a show that will be a couple of hours of anyone’s time well spent – and no football match guarantees that, as any fan will tell you.
After its Gala Durham run, The Bench, with Lee Ward’s commendably elaborate set, will hit the road for an extensive regional tour, accompanied all the way by Show Racism the Red Card which does such commendable work.
Check CaroleW Productions for the itinerary.