This heart-warming, simply told play is set in the dressing room of Barely Athletic, a soccer team competing in the Gay and Lesbian 5-a-side League. ‘Jumpers For Goalposts’ is written by Tom Wells, the winner of Britain’s 2012 George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright.

Tom Wells is a gifted young writer who was born and raised on a farm in Yorkshire. He has proven to be a generous, sympathetic, and heartfelt playwright whose work focuses on everyday life, especially for members of the LGBTQ community.

Hope springs eternal in the post-game locker room of Barely Athletic, an amateur soccer team competing in the local five-a-side pub league.

The League is no ordinary league. It’s the Gay and Lesbian 5-a-side League. And the play’s not really about football. It’s about these 5 people and the various challenges and excitements and sadnesses of their lives.

We get to spend time with them and see them enjoying one another’s company, exchanging banter in the changing room… and also facing some pretty big obstacles in their lives together.

Author of the same name, Tom Wells said: “Tom Wells has such a distinct voice. For such a young writer he’s incredibly funny. He’s incredibly humane. He writes characters that we all recognise and fall in love with a little bit.”

Wells’ Politicised Youth

Being beaten up as a young gay man in London in 2011 immediately politicised Tom Wells. At the time he was a fledgling playwright, working on a romantic comedy set among a gay five-a-side football team. The work then became politicised, with one of the characters having a back-story where he was beaten up, and was living with the consequences.

But Wells says that he doesn’t want to write about people that are victims, whose sexuality, or people’s perception of it, has damaged them. The play you see tonight wears its politics lightly, even though the writer feels that “the world is a bit more homophobic than you realise if you’re straight”.

Wells initially didn’t see a career in playwriting but came to love the art form, and has since won awards for his 2011 play The Kitchen Sink, including Most Promising Playwright. Now he says he relishes the opportunity of being able to put on plays about his own experiences of being gay.

With ‘Jumpers for Goalposts’ he wanted to write “a straightforward play that has gay people in it. The thing about having just one gay character is you can only tell one story, and actually there are lots of different stories:

“A lot of plays about gay people are about people in a bar, being hedonistic, not being supportive of each other, and that’s not what my experience of being gay is like. What you write is the play you want to see in the world, and I thought, what would I have loved to have seen when I was 15?”

‘Jumpers for Goalposts’ is a play that’s full of heart. It’s going to be a great night’s entertainment, and not just for lovers of ‘The Beautiful Game’.

Cast: Lizzy Noone, Stephen Grimes, Conor Chatten, Niall Matthews, Liam Doyle.

Director: Marie Kelly (God of Carnage, According to Hoyle)

Skerries Theatre Group present ‘Jumpers for Goalposts’ by Tom Wells in The Little Theatre, Skerries, from 15th – 24th Feb (Thurs – Sat) at 8.15pm.

Tickets €12 by ringing (or better still, texting) 087 210 5432. Price includes complimentary glass of delicious wine!

€10 special price if you mention when booking that you saw us on GCN.ie!