“Rugby takes its toll.” Former Irish rugby international captain Brian O’Driscoll’s pithy comment comes pertinently to mind in Maria Connolly’s Under the Lights from c21 Theatre Company at Belfast’s The Mac.
Connolly’s one-hander is an engaging portrait of newly converted schoolboy player Josh as he faces the biggest game of his young life, blissfully unaware that it will result in him facing his biggest challenge in the aftermath of two brutal tackles.
The pressurised world of competitive rugby has been dealt with before on stage, most conspicuously, albeit from very different perspectives, in David Storey’s The Changing Room and John Godber’s Up ’n’ Under.
But the toll that Driscoll alludes to has only recently begun to be discussed. Where Lewis Aaron Wood’s Bones, seen at London’s Peckham and Park theatres in 2022 and 2023, dealt with issues of mental health in the game, Connolly writes with fretful, knowing authority about the physical dangers involved in the most pulverising of contact sports.
Herself a mother of former rugby-playing sons, she is equally assured in acknowledging and describing the attractions and glamour of a game that promises to transform the aimless teenaged Josh as he feels and flexes his way towards adulthood.
Connolly’s portrait—funny, fresh and admirably free from any suspicion of sermonising—celebrates the rugby convert’s new-found enthusiasm before providing a clarion note of caution about the dangers of the game’s bone-crunching reality and the damage inflicted on the brain from serious collisions. The tackles that threaten Josh are realised with wincing, flinching immediacy by director Stephen Kelly and the gleeful, gangly Josh in an immediately likeable, affably energetic performance by John Travers.
Some first night nerves aside, Travers already has the makings of a solid characterisation, one as bullish and brittle as growing up often is, that promises to come into its own as the piece is played in. Familiarity will no doubt also solve issues of tightening and an occasionally blurred focus in an otherwise direct and dynamic production.
With a running time not far off the length of a rugby game, Under the Lights is an engaging and important piece of theatre whose appeal goes beyond the rugby parents and their children who were noticeably present on the opening night.
A regional tour of Under the Lights is currently being put together to follow its short run at The Mac.