It was a day of celebration. The players from the North British Rubber Company (NBRC) in Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge had been pitched against their rivals from Ramage & Ferguson shipbuilders at no less a ground than Tynecastle Park, home of Heart of Midlothian football club.
But it was also a day of tragedy. This was July 1916 and in the far-away Somme, the very men whom NBRC had been supplying with wellington boots were suffering catastrophic losses.
This is the compelling tension underscoring Sweet FA, the story of the workplace women’s football teams who enjoyed enormous popularity during the first world war.
It’s a bittersweet tale. On the one hand, the conflict gave the women unparalleled opportunities at work and play; on the other, it robbed them of brothers, sons and husbands. That the women’s game would be curtailed by a postwar ban lasting 50 years only adds to the injustice.
And where better to tell this tale than on a stage perched on Tynecastle’s main stand, with the empty stadium as its backdrop? Performed by a tremendous nine-strong ensemble, the play by Paul Beeson and Tim Barrow draws on the popular theatre tradition laid down by 7:84 and Wildcat to blend community history and original songs by Matthew Brown in a lively, polemical show.
There is a lot of history to distil – what with suffragettes, the 1918 flu pandemic and the machinations of the football authorities – and the play could do with a little less of it, but Bruce Strachan’s production is sharp, funny and well-drilled.
From Rachel Millar’s Alice, with her sights on Preston’s unbeatable Dick, Kerr Ladies, to Heather Cochrane’s Helen, with her hidden coaching skills, the cast have the coordination and sparkle of Premier League champions.