Red Pitch warms up for its West End opening night: ‘The canvas is larger now’

Back of the net: Tyrell Williams’ Red Pitch has transferred to the West End, opening in the revelatory, in-the-round venue @sohoplace. Meeting the team inside the bright, light rehearsal rooms @sohoplace, the hype around the transfer, like a prodigy midfielder moving to a bigger club, feels palpable.

But like that same prodigy midfielder surging from the under-21s to the national team, Williams has become one of the hottest new talents in the theatre scene, winning every new writer prize going when Red Pitch opened at the font of so much top-notch writing talent, the Bush Theatre. 

As any playwright (or footballer) would tell you, success doesn’t come overnight, but through six years of graft, refinement, patience and, a small stroke of good fortune, as Williams explains: “Back in 2018, there was a writers’ festival (Lyric Hammersmith’s Young Harts Writers Festival) where the writer is paired up with a director and a group of actors for a week-long development for a ten-minute piece – and luckily I was partnered up with this guy.” 

The ‘guy’ in question, sat to Williams’ right, is director Daniel Bailey – warm, enthusiastic and laughing jovially along as his writer continues to delve into the show’s history: “We were partnered up and, at the end of the development week, audiences had to vote for their favourite piece – and we won the audience vote. I remember Daniel saying to me ‘you have something here, keep developing it.” Williams says he still has the first feedback form from that festival six years ago. 

Develop it Williams did, fleshing out the small section into a larger play as part of a residency at Ovalhouse (now the newly opened Brixton House in south London). Then, the insurmountable obstacle of lockdown happened – which gave Williams time to refine the piece (“I kept sending drafts to my agent!”). After that, the Bush invited Williams to give a reading of the piece – which led to two blisteringly successful runs at the west London venue, the first two chapters of a tale that taken the piece to the West End. 

For Bailey, Red Pitch has generated such a wonderful following over the years: “the audience were a major part of the show and how we developed it at the Bush – even how we grew it during that first ten minutes all those years ago. At the Bush we saw people getting invested in the show – alongside the amazing marketing team, the word of mouth spread so quickly and did so much for the play. In football terms you talk about the fans as the twelfth player, so for us the audiences and the supporters have been the same.” 

But where did the story of Red Pitch, about three friends striving to make it big in the football world while also grappling with their own personal circumstances, come from? Williams explains the organic departure point: “The idea came when I was on the bus, driving past these houses that sat on a football pitch where my friends and I used to play. The idea that these houses were now taking up the space that used to be important to my friends and I made me immediately want to start writing.” 

Discussions of space, and ownership and occupation of space, are a recurrent one when chattig about the project with the team. Red Pitch’s subject matter deals with the importance of spaces like inner-city football pitches, while the show’s growth has been in part down to the spaces where the it has been seen. 

The first of these was the Bush, which all of the company talk fondly of – as cast member Francis Lovehall puts it: “It’s a space that is about the work and is dedicated to new writing that represents people whose voices aren’t always in the mainstream. That ethos now continues to the West End, he explains: “Knowing this play came from the Bush is part of the spirit we take with us. We’re bringing the whole team from the Bush, the whole family – yes there are new additions for the West End – knows that we’ve done this before, and we can take that confidence with us.”

But the newest space is @sohoplace, where the show has its opening night this evening, configured in the round to allow the actors to sit at the heart of a cauldron. This new venue brings with it new opportunities, as cast mate Kedar Williams-Stirling states: “The canvas is larger so we’re excited to see how much space we can take up.” 

Bailey reminded Williams that he even picked up an award (at the Critic’s Circle Theatre Awards) on the @sohoplace stage: “A year ago you won an award here – one of your five writing awards! Even when you got up on that stage to look around, you thought about how the play might work here.” 

As a director, Bailey knows the venue gels well with the text: “It’s the perfect venue for the show – we can lean into different ideas in the design aspect in comparison to the Bush. The theatre has a stadium feel – which we can explore – and the energy of the in-the-round space can be a beautiful challenge.” 

Spaces like the Bush or @sohoplace allow creatives to develop and hone their crafts, and that also feels like a driving force behind the production, according to Lovehall: “It’s about digging deeper – I want to find more truths in it – every time we go back to it, and experience it, you find out more about it –  I didn’t think I’d go on such a journey with the play. I’ve learnt so much with it and it’s informed so much about my career.”

Williams-Stirling agrees – each step of the journey then guides the next step, meaning the past is constantly informing the present: “You don’t really know what you’ve done until you’ve done it, but by having this really nice, spaced out process between each run where we’ve been able sit back and see what we’ve accomplished, properly. Which then informs what comes next.”

Lovehall concludes: “I’m excited for people who saw it at the Bush to see it, I’m excited for new audiences to see it. Like any play it’s evolving – just like we are all evolving. I’m looking forward to finding out where that journey takes us and how audiences respond to it.”