Stewart Pringle’s The Bounds is an audacious and unsettling new work that takes the ancient rituals of Tudor-era “folk football” as a starting point to explore themes of community, power, and the fragility of belief systems. This darkly comic folk horror is an ambitious co-production between the Royal Court and Live Theatre in Newcastle.
The play is set in 1553 during the reign of the staunchly Protestant King Edward VI. We are introduced to Percy (Ryan Nolan) and Rowan (Lauren Waine), two rough-tongued villagers tasked with defending the outer boundaries of an annual Whitsun football match between their village of Allendale and their rivals in Catton. This primitive version of football had few rules – the “pitch” stretched for miles across the countryside and matches could last for days, with violence and even deaths not uncommon.
Nolan and Waine have an irresistible earthy chemistry as the bantering Percy and Rowan, their coarse camaraderie and profane Northern vernacular providing many laugh-out-loud moments early on. But the arrival of the upper-class Samuel (Soroosh Lavasani) in his foppish black silks hints at deeper unease beneath the rowdy humour. Lavasani brings an enigmatic presence, his motivations unclear from the outset as he ingratiates himself with the peasants.
As night falls, Pringle’s play takes on an increasingly nightmarish and symbolic quality. The violent football ritual seems to merge with the religious upheaval of the Protestant Reformation, as the characters’ parochial squabbles become bound up in the redrawing of boundaries, persecution of Catholics, and the disruption of the old social order by powerful outside forces.
Director Jack McNamara’s immersive production makes excellent use of Verity Quinn’s elemental set design of mud and boulders, lit with an eerie glow by Drummond Orr. The soundscape by Matthew Tuckey adds to the unsettling, folkloric atmosphere. While not all of Pringle’s thematic threads quite cohere, the play remains gripping thanks to the superb trio of performances at its core.
Ultimately, The Bounds uses the ancient football ritual as a vessel to explore ideas of tradition, power, persecution, and humanity’s fraught relationship with the land. It’s an admirably strange, haunting, and intellectually ambitious work from an exciting new voice in British theatre. The Bounds continues through July 13th.
