HULL Truck has a long history of staging sporting endeavours, from rugby league to football, skiing to darts, crown bowls to keep-fit, judo to wrestling, horse-racing to more rugby league.
Gordon Steel's Sunday football drama Studs has returned for its third run. Steel himself directed its 2001 debut, and now the task falls to another director with a comedy writing pedigree, Nick Lane, who strives to balance the overpowering earthy comic exuberance with more focus on the pathos that marked Steel's earlier yet somehow more mature works, Dead Fish and Like A Virgin.
In truth, Steel's dialogue undermines his cause because the Teesside playwright is trigger happy on the fun gun. Even in serious scenes, he can't resist a mood-breaking gag when he could hold the moment for longer.
There is no denying he has the common touch, however, and so the laughs come as fast as a flying winger (Steel's old Sunday League position) in a tale of goals and girls and the art of scoring on pitch and bed alike.
The lads' mag lads of the Eston Bank Hotel team have the industrial mouth but not the ball skills of Wayne Rooney as Steel follows the Sunday side's form on and off the park. Not for the first time at Hull Truck, Robert Angell takes the narrator's role, as team manager and senior player Ronnie House, the lugubrious centre-half still in love with the beautiful game despite injury curtailing his long-ago trial at Leeds United. Angell never wastes a line, capturing the tone sought by Lane's direction.
The play's vulgar energy is supplied by David MacCreedy's shaven-headed hard man and goal king Billy MacNicholas, a Mad Mac made all the madder when he discovers that dim girlfriend Kylie (Amy Thompson) has fallen pregnant after a one-night stand with midfielder Tom "Tommo" Simpson (company debutant Frazer Hammill).
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Tommo's budget-priced WAG girlfriend, Mandy (a bolder-than-brass Liz Carney), waves the offside flag, and Steel turns to knitting together the common themes of relationships in sport and love. Graham Kirk's quick-changing set adds to the punchy pace, the one-liners crash like waves, the cast gives 110 per cent, Brian, but Studs is blunt rather than sharp.
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