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REVIEW: Up'n'Under at the Devonshire Park Theatre
YOU don't have to understand rugby league football to enjoy this play, produced by talking Scarlet, but it helps.
Especially appreciating that winning is extremely unlikely for an amateur team which has only six players including a manager who insists on 'man to man marking' in a seven-a-side tournament.
The play is a warm-hearted comedy about this very working-class sport rooted firmly in the North of England.
Award-winning playwright John Godber bases his story on a hopelessly unfit pub team from the Wheatsheaf Arms who initially can muster only four players and boast an unbroken record of defeats.
An ex-professional player, whose film idol is the boxer Rocky, becomes their player-manager and bets his life savings on this bunch of no-hopers beating a team from the Cobblers Arms who have never lost a game and whose corrupt manager regards the bet as a way of making easy money.
A bare stage dominated by high rugby posts adapts to represent team changing room, saloon bar, fitness room and the field of play.
Thanks to down-to-earth performances by the five men and their coach, a super-fit woman, the pace never flags and the production skilfully combines humour, pathos, amusing songs, poetic interludes, and characters narrating events in a manner which would have done justice to works by Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas.
The two managers, Arthur (John Goodrum) and Reg (Samuel Clemens), are chalk 'n' cheese opposites; no-nonsense trainer, Hazel (Katie Bonna) provides the right touch of femininity in a testosterone-filled environment and the four Wheatsheaf lads, Phil (Ben de Halpert), Frank (Patric Kearns), Tony (Robert Laughlin) and Steve (Samuel Clemens), individually and collectively capture the essence of their characters as well as the game.
Eddie Waring, one-time doyen of rugby league TV commentators, and frequent user of the catchphrase 'up 'n' under', would be chuffed.
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Weather for Eastbourne
Monday 13 February 2012
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