Bryony Shanahan on directing sports drama Same Team: 'Football is my cultural identity'

Bryony Shanahan’s lifelong love of football made her the perfect person to direct Same Team – A Street Soccer Story, writes Mark Fisher

When Bryony Shanahan was launching herself as a theatre director, she went for an interview at the Manchester Royal Exchange. They asked her who her favourite director was. She did not hesitate in her reply. “Alex Ferguson,” she said.They thought she was joking. Did this young woman from Stoke-on-Trent not know anything about theatre? But she was in earnest. A life-long football fan, she believed the Manchester United manager was the epitome of good direction. She still does.

“Football is my cultural identity,” says Shanahan, who played for Stoke City Ladies as a teenager. “I saw far more football growing up than I ever did theatre and the parallels are so obvious. The game has been worked out, there’s a strategy at play but it is live and it needs a crowd. If you’re in it, you can express yourself, there is a value in what you bring and you have to work within a team.”

All of which makes Shanahan the ideal candidate to direct Same Team – A Street Soccer Story. Written in conjunction with members of the Dundee Women’s Street Soccer team, it is a fictional story about five players competing for the Homeless World Cup in Milan.“Both theatre and football have given me a place where I can express myself, make connections and grow confidence,” says Shanahan, who went on to become joint artistic director of the Royal Exchange for four years. “At the training centre in Dundee, you can see how transformative it is. It’s not really about the football or the theatre, it’s about having spaces where those kind of relationships can happen and you can feel part of something.”At the other end of the scale, Robbie Gordon does not have a footballing bone in his body. “I was woeful at school,” he says. “I was always last picked and, if anything, I was shoved in goals.”

The Traverse Theatre production Same Team stars Neshla Caplan, Dawn Sievewright, Hiftu Quasem, Louise Ludgate and Hannah Jarrett-Scott.

But when he and co-playwright Jack Nurse were signed up to work with the Dundee Change Centre with a view to producing a play about the organisation’s Street Soccer sessions, he knew he would have to join in. For the past 18 months, he and Nurse have become regulars not only in the viewing box but also at the weekly training sessions. He talks with the enthusiasm of a convert.

“It’s been a bit of a bootcamp for me and I’ve found a passion for football,” says Gordon. “My partner recently said, ‘I never thought you were into football and now you’re talking about it all the time.’ She’s perplexed at that. Me and Jack are now playing twice a week. They put on obstacle courses for us that get increasingly difficult. The last one involved a trampoline, so we’ve been put through our paces.”

This show is for Edinburgh’s Traverse, but Gordon and Nurse also run Wonder Fools, a theatre company dedicated to Scotland’s untold stories. The centre’s commitment to socially disadvantaged people was a good fit. The playwrights believe in working closely with those they are writing about and creating a community around their work.

They had assumed their post-training writing workshops in Dundee would generate a piece about men and women, but what emerged was an all-female story. “The Street Soccer women’s set-up is doing such amazing work and changing the face of who we think football is for,” he says. “The women’s game was on the up and I was personally finding so much joy out of watching women’s football. When we were with the women’s team we had such an incredible time and were made to feel so welcome. Also the stories were so rich.”

That suits Shanahan who is delighted about the astonishing rise of women’s football. “When I was a young kid playing, I never thought I would see the national team on BBC One,” says the director, whose elite squad is made up of actors Chloe-Anne Tylor, Hannah Jarrett-Scott, Hiftu Quasem, Neshla Caplan and Louise Ludgate. “I don’t think we should separate it from what it means politically: so many women are demonstrating what is possible.”

Same Team is not a true story but is rooted in the lives of the real-life players, who helped shape the characters and furnish them with anecdotes. “The project is embedded in long-term engagement with these women and it was important to Robbie and Jack that it wasn’t exploiting their stories,” says Shanahan. “There is a safe distance in creating fictional characters that the women can relate to and recognise.”

Gordon points out that the Homeless World Cup embraces players from many backgrounds, including asylum seekers and those in drug or alcohol rehabilitation who have been homeless recently. “It’s a broad church,” he says. “It’s not just people on the street but also people at risk of losing their housing. One result of the cost-of-living crisis is people being more at risk than ever before. We’re seeing a fragile society which the play aims to capture.”

Shanahan, who has been inspired to start playing again with her local team in Manchester, cannot imagine a more perfect play to direct than one requiring football in the rehearsal room. “When I go back home and watch Stoke, the sense of a crowd being so invested and feeling they have permission to roar is what I want to achieve in theatre,” she says. “There’s not a bigger opportunity than this one. I would love it if the audience were rowdy.”

Same Team – A Street Soccer Story, Traverse, Edinburgh, until 23 December.