Same Team at the Traverse Theatre – Edinburgh Fringe review

Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse’s Same Team had a brilliant original run last Christmas at the Traverse Theatre, swapping festive cheer for chants and jeers. It now returns for a heady summer season in the same venue. Following a Scottish women’s football team competing in the Homeless World Cup (and created in collaboration with Dundee Change Centre), it goes from grounded, localised issues through to international nail-biter.

Gordon and Nurse’s play hits its stride fast: transforming theatregoers into football fans, every goal brings forth a roar of approval from the audience. The intoxicating allure of triumph, however manufactured we know it is, is unquenchable.

Amongst the team are Noor, caring for a grandfather battling dementia, and Lorraine, lodging with a neighbour while watching her recently separated husband shack up with another woman. Footie might not change their lives, but it does give them a glorious chance to escape, communicate, and sometimes simply let off some rapidly curdling steam.

The five-strong cast (Kim Allan, Hana Greer, Louise Ludgate, Hannah Jarrett-Scott, and Chloe-Ann Tylor) are all firing on every cylinder here – never really stopping as they go from local turf to sweltering north Italy. Not only playing their own squad member, the cast also take on all manner of eccentric side characters and spectators.

When you’re piling through group stages and knock-out games, even Bryony Shanahan’s best efforts can’t stop some of the matches feeling repetitive – though Gordon and Nurse add enough gags and commentary fluff to keep it moving briskly along. Back-of-the-net stuff.

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