Good For A Girl is Becky Deeks’s first full-length play. It is based on her own experience as an amateur footballer in south London and in Birmingham supplemented with interviews with professional players.
The play is a celebration of the solidarity and friendship Deeks found in football, but it explores the misogyny she found there too. It opened in the same week that Emma Raducanu was forced to halt her match against Karolina Muchova in Dubai because she was being intimidated by a stalker in the crowd, so sport can provide a useful lens through which to view the current state of gender relations.
Good For A Girl tells a classic, minor league to FA Cup Final story about the fictional Queensgate AFC. The cast of five play members of the team: Kim, the captain (Elizabeth Hope) and her partner Liv (Molly Walker), the rising star, Gabi (Saskia Davis), the new mum, Courtney (Gina Jamieson) and the newcomer Naomi (April Nerissa Hudson). The coach, Mark, and the club manager, Terry, loom large over the women’s lives but they are never seen.
As the team continues its cup run, the tension builds between the demands of the game and the private lives of these amateur players. And while all amateur athletes, male and female, needs to juggle work, family and training, the pressure on women is particularly acute. Gabi coaches a girls’ team and, since her mum left, her nan has looked after her sisters, so any time spent training is time when she isn’t helping the family. Courtney had to take a year out to have her child, and now she’s back with the team, she is struggling to recover her form. Meanwhile, Liv sustains an injury which could end her playing career, and Naomi struggles to fit in, leaving Kim to try and hold the team, and her relationship with Liv, together.
The FA Cup campaign is a hook on which to hang an examination of what sport means to the women involved. It is a place where they can build confidence, develop their fitness and improve their mental health. But it also provides an opportunity for predatory older men to groom and exploit vulnerable girls and young women.
The play is based on factual research, and Deeks works into the dialogue references to the absence of sanitary bins in the club toilets, the pay, or lack of, that the women receive and the fact that the women’s team never gets to play on the main pitch because the club wants to keep it in good condition for the men’s matches.
This is a fast-moving, high energy, physical theatre piece. The dialogue is short and choppy, the stylised football match scenes are tightly choreographed by the director, Lucy Wild, and the training scenes are genuine workouts. Laura O’Connell’s changing room set provides a flexible space for the many scene changes, and Clive Meldrum’s sound design alternates between offstage crowd noise and a cool playlist for the choreography.
Good For A Girl is at The Rep until 22 February and then heads out on a short tour to Malvern, Derby, Coventry and Leicester.