Beautiful game an ideal playing field for tragicomic tale of adolescent angst

As the curtain rises on the FIFA World Cup this week, Theatre Works brings us a striking American play that highlights the beautiful game.

Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves – shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2017 – follows the fortunes of a girls’ high school soccer team. It’s structured around weekly training sessions, where the girls assemble on a soccer field to practice and play and gossip among themselves.

Inventive staging transforms the space in this production. The audience flanks a rectangular expanse of astroturf in two banks at right angles, as if arranged for the best possible view of a corner kick, and the action is peppered with soccer drills and choreographed exercise routines that ground all the chat in physical presence and prowess.

The performers seem to relish letting their feet do the talking, though it’s the intricacy of the overlapping ensemble dialogue that’s the play’s defining feature.

The Wolves is structured largely as naturalistic adolescent gossip. While director Belle Hansen makes a fair fist of orchestrating the dialogue so that it feels overheard, the venue’s challenging acoustics don’t make her task easier: some of the hubbub is difficult to comprehend, and occasional nuances in exposition are lost.

Yet, the central dynamic is animated precisely, as the girls navigate shifting goalposts between individual and collective identity, between working out who they are and how they behave, unconsciously or otherwise, as social beings.

Topics of conversation rove widely and snake from the global to personal and back again. A discussion about the trial of an elderly genocidaire from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge might yield to whispered speculation (behind other girls’ backs) about which team member had an abortion. Or why the new, homeschooled member of the team (Desiree Katakis) lives in a yurt. Or who can pull off a bicycle kick.

Each player carves out a distinctive niche, as friendships, rivalries and betrayals emerge. A stalwart striker and her best friend (Bek Shilling and Shanu Sobti) fall out after a ski trip, the reliable team captain (Erin Perrey) tries to keep her motley bunch of likeable oddballs focused, and their goalie (Ellie Nunan) suffers serious anxiety disorder that will take the arrival of tragedy to cure.

One player won’t survive the season, and that revelation, when it comes, sees a piteous monologue from a grieving Soccer Mom (Emily Joy) reduce the group to stunned silence, and a recommitment from the team to honour their dead friend.

A final moving moment gets smudged a little, partly by design ch