Sam is a know-it-all teenager who dreams of the celebrity and big wage packets of professional football as he kicks a ball around the local park and boasts that he has been signed up by the Chelsea Academy. Billy - a broken-down, smelly heap of a man who sits in the park with a beer in his hand - has actually played for Chelsea: in the 1939 season he was the sensational teenage striker known as Billy the Kid. But the war brought an end to his hopes of fame and glory, and now all Billy has is his memories and the possibility of teaching Sam a thing or two, if only the lad would listen.
Tony Graham takes liberties with Michael Morpurgo's children's novel, but scores with a 90-minute show that wears its football lightly. The young audience members get the chance to take some goal kicks before the show begins, but while the piece captures all the thrill of a big match day, this is as much a tale of lives shaped by war and the merciless march of history as it is about football. It skips lightly from the famous Christmas Eve match between German and English soldiers in no man's land, through the second world war and the liberation of Belsen, to the present day.
This is a softly spoken play that doesn't thump its messages home, more reflective than rowdy as past and present, young and old rub together and create friction. It boasts two wonderfully fresh performances from Sam Donovan as the youngster and Dudley Sutton as the grumpy old codger whose ears still ring with the roar of the crowd.
· Until June 10. Box office: 020-7645 0560.
