Fit and Proper People - review

On the overlap: Katy Stephens as Casey with Kerron Darby and David Yip
10 April 2012

Football might be our national obsession, but theatre is woefully short of decent plays about the beautiful game. Try as playwright Georgia Fitch might - and my goodness, she has done so much research you can almost hear the pips squeak - Fit and Proper People is not going to rectify the situation.

This co-production between Soho and the RSC has got its kit right. The theatre has been remodelled into a slice of a stadium, complete with dugouts, turf and two stands facing each other for audience seating.

It's once the seven actors, overstretched with multiple parts, start talking in frantic, overlapping sentences that all becomes convoluted and undramatic. Casey Layton (Katy Stephens), an agent made good, is on a mission to propel her unfashionable home-town team into the Premiership. For this she needs money, which is where dubious foreign businessman Frank Wong (David Yip) comes in. Casey is a Karren Brady wannabe, who never succeeds in telling the club's venal manager that he's fired.

Fitch ticks off every issue facing the game - bungs and Wags, dubious consortia and shady transfers, sex scandals and substance abuse - and it sounds less like a play and more like a walking op-ed piece from one of the loftier sports pages. We long to be made to care about these characters and this team, but neither the actors nor director Steve Marmion can overcome the script. It feels, exhaustingly, like a game of at least 27 halves.

Fit and Proper People
Soho
SW1

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