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The Wolves review – swaggering, tender tales of women's football

Theatre Royal Stratford East, London
Teenaged soccer players in the US suburbs laugh, gossip and fight in Sarah DeLappe’s play

In Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-nominated debut play, the Wolves are a women’s indoor soccer team, navigating their wobbly way from adolescence to adulthood while training for their next game in the US suburbs. DeLappe wonders if, “plucked from its native habitat, this deeply American portrait will feel even more so”. She’s right: her team of nine high-schoolers might as well have played basketball instead.

But in Ellen McDougall’s production, the primary focus is not sport but the nature of the group itself and the way the girls speak to each other in this female-only space. They talk at once, in multiple conversations. One player comments on the limits of freedom in China: “They don’t have Twitter there.” At the same time, another speaks about the benefits of tampons over sanitary pads. They laugh, bitch, gossip and fight, the dialogue reflecting a certain kind of young female sensibility and experience.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SyairC
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