Tyrell Williams was on a bus through London’s Elephant & Castle in 2018 when he noticed the football pitch he played on as a teenager had been built over. “It was an important place to me and my friends,” he says. The loss of it stirred up feelings of nostalgia, frustration and sadness – so much so that when Williams got back home he was moved to write. What he didn’t know then was that his anger would eventually result in an award-winning debut play.
Today Williams, 29, is sitting in the upstairs bar of Soho Place, the West End theatre where that play, Red Pitch, transfers on 15 March after two successful runs at west London’s Bush theatre, in 2022 and 2023. It is a big moment for Williams, who has dreamed of being a “storyteller” since he was a teenager reading out his work writing to his family.
Williams studied creative writing and journalism at Middlesex University but becoming a writer “never felt tangible” until the end of his final year. Even so, he always pursued as many personal creative projects as possible, ranging from making short films for the BFI to writing comedy. It was that latter passion that led to his big break: the viral BBC Three web mockumentary #HoodDocumentary, which he created with his friend Kayode Ewumi in 2015.
“We just started playing around with a camera,” says Williams. “Now everyone seems to do stuff like that but no one really was at the time. We just filmed ourselves and were like: ‘OK, that’s funny, let’s try it.’” Williams had always been a fan of mockumentary as a genre, and so #HoodDocumentary used the form to follow the “triple threat” singer, dancer and actor Roll Safe as he tried to convince London he was the next big thing. “I think in mockumentary you can really capture character … we wanted to make something about the people we knew in our area – the people we saw growing up.”
The initial series started on Twitter’s now defunct short video platform Vine and went on to get millions of YouTube views. Its influence on comedy was so great it’s still being felt today with performers such as Mo Gilligan and Munya Chawawa expressing their admiration. “I think it showed a trajectory that other people could walk down,” Williams says. “It is nice to feel like it has a legacy. The meme from that show [with Ewumi tapping his temple to denote “smart”] is still in use today.”
#HoodDocumentary was just the beginning of the hard work for Williams, who spent years on Red Pitch before it got its first run. The play tells the story of three 16-year-old boys, Omz, Bilal and Joey, who live on a council estate in south London, and deals with themes of young male friendship and community. “Sixteen is such a distinct age because you’re not an adult but you are sort of branching into that territory,” Williams says. “At that age I remember feeling a lot of things at once.” Set on their estate’s concrete football pitch, it sees the boys practise their skills and prepare for football trials. But, in the background, the threat of gentrification is always there: homes are being torn down, people are slowly moving away and the noise of construction is constant.
Williams remembers the shadow of redevelopment looming over his childhood in south London. Still, he admits to not being properly aware of the effects of gentrification until it was too late: “It wasn’t until my friends had to leave, and the soul of the place started to change, that I started to think: ‘Oh, OK, something is happening here.’ People spend so much of their lives in these places. They buy their flats and maybe have hope of passing them down to their children – then, abruptly, it can all just be taken away.”
In Red Pitch, the football field becomes a place of therapy where the boys train together but also slowly begin to let out their fears about the world. “Football is an icebreaker,” Williams explains. “When you’re that young, you love your friends and want to talk to them, but you’re not quite able to yet. There’s still this bravado.”
The “conflict of wanting to express something but not being able to” is what Williams hopes people hear in his characters – particularly in Omz, a young carer. Using his own experience of looking after his uncle, who had dementia, as a springboard, Williams set out to write a character that had a similar weight of responsibility: “Even though I was older when I was caring for my uncle, I wanted to allude to the difficulties young carers might face. In that moment it is often easier to approach things head on, rather than finding the words to talk about it.”
He also wanted to “honour” many of the teenagers he knows from working at a youth club “who find themselves having to be parental figures for one reason or another”. It is clear that these young people are embedded into Red Pitch’s texture: “I listen to their conversations and what interests them. Sometimes they’ll say stuff and I’ll ask them: ‘What does that mean?’ in the coolest way I can so they don’t think I’m old.”
He speaks plainly about the challenges of being a teenager today: the limited representation, the financial struggles and the prevalence of the online world. “Social media has totally changed the experience. You make a mistake and it could exist for ever online now. There could be better and more spaces to support teenagers as they transition into adulthood. Young men have a lot of anger and frustration that they don’t know what to do with. There’s always this line: one minute you could be making a joke and then suddenly you have offended someone and they respond with violence.”
It was theatre’s ability to convey such complex emotions that made it Williams’s first love. He took part in a programme at London’s Young Vic theatre while he was at secondary school and describes it as his gateway into the industry. “I just love the visceral nature of storytelling above anything else,” he says. But he acknowledges that it was rare to see people like him working in the sector when he was growing up: “Young people need to see themselves represented to know that they are important.”
“Things have improved in terms of representation,” he says. But only partly. He speaks positively about the artists of today, particularly those he’s had the “luck” of working with; he couldn’t be more grateful to the Bush theatre, which gave him his first shot, Red Pitch’s director Daniel Bailey and the theatre director Ola Ince. But he’s less encouraged about the national state of the arts. “There’s a real push at the moment to withdraw money from the sector. New artists are the future of culture and we have to make sure we’re investing in them. When I think about my journey into the arts, I’ve been directly impacted by the government’s cuts. As a nation we are in a difficult place – the lack of budget means people are discouraged from creating,” says Williams.Since he wrote Red Pitch in 2018, Williams’s relationship to the work has changed. “I see things differently now, I’m more distant from it. I’m more critical, I’m older,” he says. Each new production of the play has made Williams reflect on the past versions of himself; when he hears the lines where his characters grapple with what they want to do versus what the world wants them to, he feels particularly introspective. “It resonates with me in a way it didn’t when I was writing it. It makes me look back and consider what I was thinking at the time and where I really wanted to be.”
All the hard work in the years since has been worth it, though. “Now feels exciting,” he says. Not least because he’s writing an Apple TV+ comedy, which he can’t say much about beyond that he thinks it’s funny. He spent some time in LA earlier this year in writers’ rooms of other new projects, too. Success hasn’t changed him: he still has jitters about Red Pitch’s West End premiere and hopes audiences believe in the friendship that he’s created.
Still, there is no chance his West End debut will be as anxiety-inducing as when he was on the football pitch as a teenager. “I never feel as nervous as when I played 11-a-side,” he says. “That was something else. I’ve never felt that kind of fear.”
Red Pitch is at Soho Place, London, 15 March to 4 May.
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