Here's a great pub quiz question: who was the first black player to represent England at all levels? Laurie Cunningham was first to appear for the under-21s. Viv Anderson was the first full international. The position of first black captain of the England team remains vacant.
This is ironic, of course, given David Beckham's fashionable adoption of many of the accoutrements of black culture. But Maurice Bessman's play questions whether England is really so integrated as to be comfortable with the prospect of a black player leading out the team.
Well, why not? Even the most xenophobic quarters of the press eventually came round to the idea of a Swedish coach. But Bessman's drama, presented by Contact and the Black Arts Development Project, was commissioned as a response to the Stephen Lawrence affair. To those events it adds an additional frisson that the play's murdered teenager, Joel Douglass, was a gifted ball player tipped to captain the national team.
The greatest drama about Lawrence's killing was the inquiry itself, eloquently transcribed and dramatised by Richard Norton-Taylor at the Tricycle Theatre. Bessman's fiction struggles to hold up an equally pertinent mirror to reality, not because the arguments are at fault, but because the pacing of Helen Perry's production falters, often to the point of seeming under-rehearsed.
Nor is the momentum of the piece aided by the prolixity of Bessman's writing. Would two grieving parents really engage in a discussion about natural selection on the morning of their son's funeral? The most arresting sequence occurs right at the beginning, with some terrifying surveillance footage of the murder - but it makes much of the debate that follows seem strained and redundant. Truly, one CCTV picture is worth a thousand words.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0161-274 0600.
