Red Pitch at The Bush Theatre
September 2023
Photo by Helen Murray
067 – Red Pitch by Tyrell Williams
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Tyrell William’s debut play, Red Pitch, is set on an inner-city football pitch in South London, which is surrounded by scaffolding recently erected to build new blocks of flats. The pitch and the neighbourhood are on the brink of change from urban regeneration, and the three teenage boys who we meet on this pitch are facing displacement from their homes as well as their own life-defining choices. Red Pitch is a coming-of-age story, with young men fighting to believe in their dreams, and to find a way up, and perhaps out, of their changing community. It is a universal story of hope and ambition, friendship and family, set in a community that has traditionally seldom been portrayed or celebrated in our theatres.
I’m very excited to have the opportunity to talk in this episode with the author of Red Pitch, Tyrell Williams, and the director of the award-winning production of the play at the Bush Theatre in West London, Daniel Bailey. The play had a wonderful reception when it was first performed at the Bush in February 2022, when it won the Off West End Award for Best New Play, as well as several awards for Tyrell, including the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards for Most Promising Playwright, as well as the Stage magazine Debut Award for Best Writer. We recorded this episode during the revival of the show in September 2023. The show’s much deserved success continued with a transfer of the Bush production to the Soho Place Theatre in London’s West End in April 2024.
Tyrell Williams
Tyrell Williams is the award-winning author of Red Pitch, which premiered at the Bush Theatre in February 2022. The play won the Off West End Award for Best New Play, as well as the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards for Most Promising Playwright, as well as the Stage magazine Debut Award for Best Writer.
Tyrell previously co-created, co-wrote and directed the viral web-series #HoodDocumentary, which has had over 4 million YouTube views, and went on to be commissioned for BBC Three. Tyrell is currently on attachment to the National Theatre Studio, and a screen adaptation of Red Pitch is in the works, as well as other TV projects.
Recommended Play
Tyrell recommended Misty by Arinzé Kene.
Daniel Bailey
Daniel Bailey is a director, dramaturg and writer, is currently the Associate Artistic Director at the Bush Theatre, where he directed Tyrell William’s play Red Pitch. Daniel has previously been the Associate Director at Birmingham Rep Theatre, Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio, Associate Artist at Theatre Royal Stratford East, and Resident Assistant Director at the Finborough Theatre.
Recommended Play
Daniel recommended A Season in the Congo by Aimé Cesairé.
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Douglas
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
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