A Live theatre production, The Red Lion, is to have a London run at Trafalgar Studios from 1 November to 2 December. Max Robert’s production of Patrick Marber’s play about a non-league football team will transfer with the same cast as in Newcastle: Stephen Tompkinson, John Bowler and Dean Bone.
The play was originally produced in 2015 at the National’s Dorfman Theatre, directed by Ian Rickson, but Marber reworked it for the Newcastle production.
“Whilst the play is inherently accessible, full of salty dialogue and laugh-out-loud set pieces,” Max Roberts said, “its lyrical qualities to my mind seem to be enhanced by the North East vernacular.
“Through Marber’s own personal experiences with non-league football, The Red Lion goes far beyond the pitch to look at hope, obsessions and the desperation of humanity to be a part of something. It is a piece that resonates in contemporary society—the two older characters are conflicted representatives of a pre- and post-1980s, one possessing a sensibility formulated by a before-Thatcher England, the other by its aftermath. In the middle a youngster is dealing with that fall out.”
“To an extent,” Patrick Marber added, “the play is dramatising something about England; that there is one strain of thought which is about community, tolerance and belonging, and there is another which represents a whole counter trajectory about what England could or should be; that England is a business.”
The play originally ran at Live from 6 April to 6 May this year.
Tickets are now available from the Trafalgar Studios box office and online.