THE Studio wall is covered with designer Beth Oppenheim's campaign bannesr for the women's suffrage movement, bearing such messages as Votes For Women.

Along with a heartily sung song extolling the same cause, it links the past and present in London company Futures Theatre's 70-minute play about football, feminism and female empowerment.

As told by playwrights Sabrina Mahfouz and Hollie McNish from research at Manchester's National Football Museum, London's Imperial War Museum and the Manchester City Women's FC and Millwall Lionesses football teams, it presents the stories of four women, each facing obstacles to play the beautiful game, linked by the prevailing barriers of inequality and neglect that test their self-belief.

Marième Diouf and Fizz Waller play Mickey and Keeley, (fictional) rival young players trialling for the England squad. Each draws on a hero for inspiration, in Mickey's case, Liverpool-born goalkeeper Emma Clarke, who became Britain's first black professional female footballer in 1892 when excelling between the posts for suffragist Mrs Graham's Glasgow team.

Keeley's guiding light is Lily Parr, gay star winger for Dick, Kerr Ladies, the Preston factory team, who were among those to raise funds for soldiers returning home from the trenches, playing to big crowds but banished by the male-run Football Association, who banned the women's game in 1921 (for 50 years) on the absurd grounds that the female body was unsuitable for such a sport.

Diouf and Waller skilfully move back and forth between their past and present-day characters, the fascinating true stories of Clarke and Parr hitting the back of the net more often than the narrower confines of Mickey and Keeley's story, which fixates too much on the media's focus on women footballers off the field: their hair, clothes and sexual orientation. There will be those who argue that the media, not least today's radio and television coverage, is now more onside than offside with how it reports the expanding women's game.

It does not help that too many of the sextet of characters – the journalist, coach and commentator – given to the multi-accented Jessica Dennis are clichéd and exaggerated for comic effect, when the angrier comic mockery of the FA's dictum has much more impact.

That said, Caroline Bryant's production is well constructed, has both momentum and poetic moments of reflection on playing the game, and even without a football in sight, is bursting with exhilarating physicality, courtesy of Diane Alison-Mitchell's football-match and training-drill movement that has the front row tucking in their feet out of harm's way!

Diouf is the pick of the players, with a wider range of expression than Waller's fiery duo, but the trio's teamwork would befit a champion team and the women's game has found a passionate supporter in Futures Theatre.

Review: Offside, Futures Theatre, York Theatre Royal Studio, tonight, kick-off at 7.45pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk