If you despair at how little work the goalie of your rival team has to do, just spare a thought for Rowan and Percy. In Stewart Pringle’s absorbing new play, they are defenders on a 16th-century football pitch that is measured in miles. This formative game, a lawless battle between rival Northumberland villages, can carry on for days. Stationed on a grassy knoll on the periphery, Rowan and Percy are like characters in Waiting for Godot (there is even a boy who arrives with a message from his master), dutifully biding their time in the hope that the action will come their way. It is hardly a spoiler to say it does not.
Just as possession of the ball eludes them, so they are more generally dispossessed. As Pringle’s play unfolds, it becomes apparent that their role as peasant labourers deprives them of agency. Kings, popes and London politics are as remote to them as the sporting action, yet in an era of reformation turmoil, embodied in the upper-class outsider Samuel, a Roman Catholic on the run, they will bear the consequences of decisions made far away.
