Moorcroft

The Scaff

02/04/24

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

For someone who has always maintained a complete indifference to the game of football, I do seem to be watching a lot of plays about it lately, all of them at the Traverse. And the thing is, the standard has been incredibly high. First up, there was the five-star masterpiece that was Moorcroft. Then there was the wonderful Same Team, which also found a fresh approach to its chosen subject. Now here’s The Scaff, the final offering in the A Play, A Pie and A Pint spring season, which I approach with some trepidation.

Can the Traverse really hope to pull off a hat trick?

Happily, it turns out that they can. Written by Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith, this is an assured and acerbically funny play, centred around a school football team. Jamie (Bailey Newsome) and Frankie (Stuart Edgar) live and breathe for the game. They spend most of their time out on the pitch, helping the team’s star player, Coco (Craig McClean), to rack up the goals. They’re also friends with Liam (Benjamin Keachie), but one day Jamie overhears Coco referring to Liam as ‘a scaff’. And while there may be some truth in the accusation – Liam’s Mum does buy own-brand crisps and Liam is forced to play in Mitzuma football boots, for God’s sake – Jamie encourages Liam to take his revenge on Coco by unleashing a hard tackle in the next game.

Liam takes his friend’s advice with disastrous consequences. Coco’s resulting injury means that the team will be without their top scorer as they approach the school cup final. Liam is in disgrace – and can Jamie and Frankie even admit to being friends with a boy who is now little more than a pariah?

Of course, The Scaff is about so much more than football. It concentrates on the subject of friendship and the difficulties that life can throw into its path. It’s also about the the constant longing to be liked and the awful fear of thinking that you are hated for things you have no control over. And mostly, it’s about the difficulties of escaping from an identity that others have bestowed on you, a term that is as degrading as it is dismissive.

The performances of the four leads are strong, each actor convincing in his respective role. I particularly enjoy Keachie’s physicality as a boy almost crippled by anxiety, forever giving sidelong glances to his companions, beseeching them for support and also forgiveness. Director Jordan Blackwood handles the tricky problem of making a quartet of actors on a bare stage convince as team players, and the performers give it their best, leaping, twirling and launching savage kicks at an imaginary ball. They manage to pull off the illusion, with the audience reacting delightedly to each successive goal. I find myself yelling and clapping along with them, something that no actual football match has never managed to make me do.

It’s been another strong season for A Play, A Pie and A Pint, and The Scaff provides a winning finalé that scores on just about every level.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney

Moorcroft

24/10/23

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

It’s Garry (Martin Docherty)’s 50th birthday and he’s not in the mood for a celebration. Instead, he prefers to think back to his teenage years and the wee amateur football team he put together with his best friends in Renfrew. He warns us in advance, this isn’t going to be an easy ride…

He assembles his crew. For starters, there’s Mick (Jatinder Singh Randhawa), once a promising member of a junior football team, now plying his trade as a hairdresser. There’s Tubs (Dylan Wood), who is gay – and in a 1980s small town, that’s seriously difficult – and there’s Paul (Sean Connor), struggling to cope with an abusive, alcoholic father. Noodles (Santino Smith) appears to be the most successful of the crew, with a decent job and the money to pay for some fancy football shirts (but should they be that shade of maroon?). Sooty (Kyle Gardiner) is a dedicated mod with a fishtail parka and no higher ambition than to ‘do a Quadrophenia’ and ride his scooter to Brighton, while Mince (Bailey Newsome) has an uncanny propensity for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time… every time.

But from their very first training session, the teammates work well together. The go from strength to strength, finding pleasure in the simple joys of kicking a ball around a pitch. They are blissfully unaware that darker times are inexorably closing in on them.

Moorcroft, written and directed by Elidh Loan, is a fabulous slice of theatre, one that moves effortlessly through a whole series of emotions. It swerves from raucous hilarity to visceral anger to heartrending tragedy with all the sure-footed precision of a well-drilled team. There are superb performances from the entire cast – particularly from Newsome as the slow-witted but oddly adorable Mince – and I especially enjoy the physical sequences as the team leap, twirl and kick their way through a series of energetic routines backed by a selection of 80s bangers. Loan knows exactly when to switch the mood. One minute I’m laughing out loud, the next my eyes are filling with tears.

It would be so easy to dismiss this as ‘a play about football’ but it’s much more than that. Moorcroft is a meditation on masculinity, its strengths, its weaknesses. It’s a reflection on the everyday deprivation of working-class life, and it’s a lament about the awful injustice of fate. Compelling and propulsive throughout, it never once relaxes its powerful grip.

It shoots, it scores. It’s a winner.

5 stars

Philip Caveney