Newcastle’s Live theatre is 51 this year. Under its latest artistic director and CEO, Jack McNamara, it continues to pursue a mission: to produce new writing that is rooted in the region and “unafraid to confront the most pressing issues of our time”. The issues explored in Stewart Pringle’s well-intentioned new play, The Bounds, are succinctly expressed in the title. They include the various ways in which people are bound (or choose to bind themselves) to sets of beliefs or patterns of existence, and the ways they are affected by seemingly arbitrary political changes that redefine the boundaries which have shaped their identities.
Percy (Ryan Nolan) and Rowan (Lauren Waine) are marking one of the bounds of the annual village football match (tufts of grass in an expanse of mud – Verity Quinn’s design). In Northumberland, in the reign of Edward VI, the rules of the game are simple: each village has a pole; the first team to hit the other’s pole wins. Injury is expected, death not unknown. Although unable even to see the action, Percy insists that he is playing “an integral part in… the most important game, possibly of our lives”.
Two strangers interrupt the usual pattern of events. The mysterious Samuel (Soroosh Lavasani) is markedly different, in his black doublet and hose, cloak and hat, from the homespun pair. A passing boy (Nathaniel Campbell-Goodwin), bearing a birch twig, brings news of the king’s decision to redraw village boundaries.
Pringle’s situation has great potential but the stretch after metaphor and relevance is strained, the characters too sketchily drawn and attempts at pathos heavy-handed, while the exaggeratedly elliptical dialogue (much of it scatological and sweary) too often teeters on parody (Howard Barker as presented by Monty Python). I would be interested to see this in a reworked version; as it stands, too many ideas are dribbled around the stage and too few converted into dramatic goals.
• At Live theatre, Newcastle, until 8 June, then the Royal Court, London, 13 June-13 July
