Own goal

For nine years Patrick Marber has grappled with writer’s block (which by some miracle doesn’t affect his screenplay work), but the pipes are now ungummed and wallop! his new bolus of creativity splatters across the Dorfman stage. It’s a wordy three-hander set in the swamp of non-league football. Marber brilliantly captures the grubbiness and despairing optimism of ageing sportsmen who inhabit a golden age that never was.

We meet Kidd, a hopeless but garrulous manager, as he tussles with Yates, a lugubrious old kit-man, for a controlling stake in a dazzling young talent, Jordan. The emotional terrain is lifted directly from Pinter and Mamet: male losers fighting over scraps of nothing. But where Pinter and Mamet use hints and shades to suggest isolation, Marber whacks it straight into the script. This club is all we have, bleat the characters. And there’s no warmth or amity between them. Exploitation and bad faith are the basis of their squabbles.

As the plot develops, the play’s configuration works against it, with the second act far longer than the first (better the other way around). The woman next to me yawned a lot. Marber’s spare, muscular dialogue is the major selling-point. There are great set-piece speeches recounting famous last-gasp victories won on mud-pie pitches against murderous oppositions. But some of the natter gets soggy. Yates recalls scoring a winner as a young hopeful. ‘I was never so loved. Nor loved this life so strong.’ In a Yorkshire accent it sounds like the Hovis advert. In Yates’s dialect, Cockney, it sounds forced.

And Marber’s characterisation goes awry. Young Jordan hints at his criminal past but he’s too naïve to summon his agent during contract negotiations. Offered a trial at Birmingham City, he moans that he’s being frozen out by non-league football.