Red is the colour of blood, passion, suffering, and salvation, if you believe in that sort of thing. In the theatre space at The Kings Arms, the room is bathed in it: a decaying sanctuary of desperation where deception eats its way through the characters right up to the final whistle.
When you picture an amateur football changing room, you usually think of camaraderie, laughter, high-stakes pressure, and maybe a few quiet, secretive corners. Step inside this production, however, and you are dragged into something far darker. In Patrick Marber’s The Red Lion, the dressing room becomes a claustrophobic pressure cooker of clandestine deals, illegal schemes, and deep moral and spiritual rot.
At the centre of the drama are three men: Kidd (Colin Connor), Yates (Howard Crossley), and Jordan (Jermaine Khalil). You quickly realise the invisible thread connecting them is not really a shared love for the beautiful game, but survival, each man serving as an older, more battered mirror of the next.
The cast did a tremendous job bringing these dynamics to life. Colin Connor is an absolute powerhouse as Kidd, playing a manager corrupt to the bone; a divorced father who has lost just about everything, visibly failing at life as much as he is in the dugout. Howard Crossley crafts the older character of Yates so brilliantly, capturing a weathered figure with a little less malice who eventually tries to serve as a saviour. Then there is Jermaine Khalil as Jordan, who knows exactly how to command his space while laying bare a raw, aching vulnerability as a lad holding a secret that pushes Kidd’s desperate plans past the point of no return.
The story pulls you in several directions, flirting with themes of exploitation, systemic corruption, and fragile male bonding. Yet, as the evening wore on, the narrative itself felt somewhat underdeveloped. I found myself waiting for Patrick Marber’s script to transcend the familiar tropes of football grit and deliver a punchier revelation. Instead, I was left with a series of question marks about the script’s true dramatic payoff, wondering whether certain beats were deliberate storytelling or just red herrings designed to fake out the audience.
Where the production undeniably scores is in its staging. Directed with gritty intimacy by David Thacker, the in-the-round performance turns the whole room into an old, grotty changing space that looks pulled straight out of an urban exploration YouTube video. Sitting on chairs tucked right behind the red-topped benches where the lads would change, we as an audience become complicit voyeurs. The realism goes right down to actual mud trampled across the floor, and that level of intimacy works brilliantly. You can practically smell the sweat, the earth, and the raw frustration of eleven men dragged off a sodden winter pitch. The cast commands that tight space with ferocious commitment, even when the text occasionally meanders and leaves a few moments searching for momentum.
On the surface, plays like this are always framed around football. On some level, it often feels like a tactic used to sell tickets to football-loving men who might not normally visit the theatre, yet the show always works so differently in reality. As I was reminded during a press launch for This Is England at The Lowry, stories like these are rarely about ninety minutes on a pitch. They are about human connection, failure, and the search for triumph against the odds. The Red Lion delivers a sharp, gritty glimpse into a world of boys trapped inside grown men, desperately trying to navigate forces determined to destroy them.
The Red Lion runs at The King’s Arms, Salford until 3rd October. Directed by David Thacker. Tickets are available at https://kingsarmssalford.com/.
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Review by James
for Canal Street Media