Result, Pleasance Theatre, N7

reviewed for The Times, 1 May 2015Result, Pleasance Theatre, N7

 

 

two_stars

Mark, a gauche young sports psychologist, turns up at a major football club’s youth academy and is shocked to discover how little provision there is for mental health in the field of football. If that sounds a cold premise for a play, it’s because Result, devised and directed by the brothers Toby and Alex Clarke, is as didactic as it gets, a dry and earnest piece of agitprop masquerading as a sports movie.

Amid the bumpy dialogue, however, there are moments of shocking beauty thanks to movement director Fionn Cox-Davies’s fluid staging of the football sequences. It’s here that the complex dynamics of a team of ambitious, insecure adolescents are given depth and verve. It’s just a shame that when our gymnastic cast return to earth it’s to spout clichés and banalities.

To be fair, most of the clichés are reserved for Mark and his nemesis, the hard-swearing football coach Carl, who growls through his welcome speech with such original turns of phrase as “I ain’t particularly nice, I ain’t your dad and I definitely ain’t your mum”, as if none of us have seen Rocky.

Carl (Cameron Jack, making a decent fist of it) has little time for Richard James-Clarke’s Mark, but then neither would most coaches confronted by a self-proclaimed sports psychologist who doesn’t know the offside rule.

We get no sense of why Mark chose to work with sportsmen in the first place (the occasional mumble about preferring tennis isn’t enough) and the hoary old stereotype of academic geek versus bullish sports obsessive ends up simply being offensive to both.

There’s engaging work in the portrayals of reflective, solitary goalie Titch (Joel Phillimore), perceptive physio Naomi (Christine During) and hyperactive defender Stokey (Paul Adeyefa). Yet for a play that aims to demystify mental health counselling in sport, Result gives us very few glimpses of what that might actually look like. And when tragedy does strike, the play bottles the chance to really address it, brushing it off stage. A missed opportunity.