Erin Harrington reviews The Wolves, by Sarah DeLappe, directed by Lizzie Tollemache, and Alone It Stands, by John Breen, directed by David Ladderman, presented by the Court Theatre Youth Company in the Wakefield Family Front Room, The Court Theatre, Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 August 2026.
One of the great pleasures of watching youth theatre is seeing talented young people, supported by skilled professionals, grapple with great material and push hard against new creative challenges. I’ve always really enjoyed Court Theatre Youth Company Shows, as there’s such a sense of joy, vulnerability and vitality about the proceedings that you can’t help but be swept along. This year, the 22-strong company is split into two. The casts have been working on two sports-themed plays for three to four months, and they alternate each night. The Wakefield Family Front Room is converted into a sports pitch: a scoreboard is mounted on a wall, and the playing space is a long rectangle of astroturf surrounded on three sides by seats. It’s a simple, economical setting, and a very good use of this sometimes difficult space.
Sarah DeLappe’s award-winning play The Wolves is an absolute gift of a script. It centres on the social dynamics of an American young women’s indoor soccer team, with each scene taking place before a Saturday morning game over the course of a season. As they stretch and warm up, the girls’ discussions roam everywhere from global issues and war crimes to acne and hair care. They annoy each other, let slip on secrets, trade gossip from their various schools and negotiate the social dynamics of adolescence. There are other challenges too: a slightly odd new girl has joined the team; the captain is both distant and overbearing; their coach is perpetually hungover; the goalie keeps puking because she’s so anxious ahead of the game; college scouts are strating to arrive. Simmering resentments that relate to sex and social power threaten to dismantle the team’s fragile sense of cohesion. Ultimately The Wolves are faced with unexpected tragedy and must grapple with what it means to be a team – to be there for one another at that liminal point where childhood and innocence are gone but adulthood is still looming.
It’s a challenging play. The women are onstage in their soccer gear almost the entire 90 minutes, frequently balancing physical movement with the vocal choreography of somplicated crosstalk, while balancing accent work with sudden shifts in tone. The opening night performance takes a little while to settle, but once it locks in it’s absolutely electric. As directed by Lizzie Tollemache, the team, each identified only by their jersey number, have really dug into the characters’ interiority and physicality. Their fully-realised performances are confident and textured, with a real sense of spontaneity. I went to an all girls’ high school and I feel completely transported back to that time, when your friendships feel as big as the world, upcoming changes are exciting and terrifying, and your sense of injustice is well-honed. You just want to protect the young women, but you can’t. The play’s initial lighthearted sense of the everyday deepens as it works towards its emotional conclusion. I’m tearful and thick-throated in the final moments, as the team seeks solace in one another, both vulnerable and defiant. It’s a well-earned dramatic climax. This is a terrific production by any metric.
John Breen’s 1999 play Alone It Stands lacks the psychological depth of The Wolves, but makes up for it in its joyful, rough-and-tumble approach to inventive comic theatrical storytelling. The play recounts the famous 1978 rugby match at Thomond Park, Limerick, where the Irish provincial side Munster defeated the touring All Blacks 12-0 – the team’s only defeat in their tour of Ireland and Britain. It’s a fast-paced and laugh-out-loud funny play that really races by. Ten actors, dressed in red and black rugby kit, play more than sixty characters, including players, coaches and refs, members of the crowd, a pregnant woman, a kid ambitiously preparing for bonfire night, and even a dog. The action switches between multiple storylines within the community and the game itself. The astroturf stage is augmented only with some wooden benches and some shifts in lighting, so it’s up to performances to build up the world. I sit up in the mezzanine for this show, and really appreciate the smart use of space and the clever blocking and ensemble work.
This piece asks for a different set of skills than The Wolves, and plays in a much more clownish register. The players meet the work’s many theatrical and physical challenges with gusto. The swift shifts in character and place demand big performances that at times embrace caricature; it’s clear the performers are enjoying playing up to the audience. At the beginning, two actors warn us that things might get a little confusing, and they are right. Lightning-quick transitions aside I think that’s also because of the work’s significant demands on the ensemble’s mostly untrained voices – noting that they are also grappling admirably with multiple accents.
There’s no complaints about the production’s physicality though. The cast are constantly on the move, jumping between short scenes, moving between comic vignettes and stylised sequences, throwing themselves about the place with glee. Their timing is terrific. David Ladderman’s direction is propulsive and dynamic. You can see his skills in teaching stage combat and physical theatre at play in the many exciting scenes in which the game plays out and the players ruck, maul, tackle, and occasionally beat the crap out of each other. The ensemble is focused – clearly match-fit, so to speak, and having a wildly good time.
Both productions are very accomplished, in their own ways, and the co-programming of the two plays is inspired. Aside from the scripts’ individual strengths and their overlapping themes, each production has an emphasis upon different types of teamwork that combine artistic merit and strong pedagogical outcomes. Performers are on stage almost the whole time and each person gets a chance to shine – not always a possibility in such productions – but everyone also has to listen and watch carefully throughout, and be accountable to one another. It’s a high stakes, high trust endeavour – a different sort of fitness to the one needed to run on the spot for pretty much two hours straight. The Youth Company, and those who have supported them to this point, should be very proud of what they’ve done. Good game, good game.
The Wolves and Alone It Stands run until Saturday 12 September. For dates, see the Court Theatre’s website.
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