A West End musical version of Bend it Like Beckham has scored positive reviews with many critics, but left others wondering whether football can ever be compatible with art.
The musical about a football-loving girl, which in London opened at the Phoenix Theatre in London last night, is based on the hit 2002 film of the same name. Adapted for the stage by the film-maker Gurinder Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges, it features music by Howard Goodall and lyrics by Charles Hart.
It follows the same plot as the film, about a British Sikh girl, Jess, who is torn between pleasing her traditional Indian parents, and fulfilling her own dreams of playing football.
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In a neat piece of timing, the musical's opening came two days after England's Women's World Cup team won a place in the quarter-finals against hosts Canada, the BBC reports. And Chadha now plans to invite the team to see the show.
The production has also been a winner with many critics. In the Daily Mail, Quentin Letts calls the musical "wonderfully, life-affirmingly, 21st century British". Like the best sort of FA cup match, it's "end-to-end entertainment, full of feisty shimmers and heart-stopping melodrama".
For Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph, it's a "bold, beautifully British triumph", and in The Times, Dominic Maxwell agrees that Chadha has hit the mark. "She shoots . . . she stages . . . she scores!" he writes.
Maxwell notes that the first half is a bit sluggish, but urges the audience to hold out for an "amusing, affecting, musically sophisticated and finally irresistible second half".
Michael Billington in The Guardian is less convinced. He praises a strong female cast, clever design and eclectic score, and says it is "perfectly enjoyable" if you accept the wish-fulfilling fairy-tale. But like the film, says Billington, it offers "easy solutions to difficult social problems".
The real problem is that football makes bad art, says Barney Ronay, also in The Guardian.
Ronay says the Beckham musical, along with Patrick Marber's new changing-room drama at the National Theatre, The Red Lion, are the latest shows to fall for the "folly" of trying to create a coherent piece of dramatic art based around football.
"On a basic level football just doesn't need to be made into a drama," says Ronay. "It already is a drama." It might be overblown drama, with cartoonish characters and B-movie villains, he says, but it's "a great, multi-layered, all-consuming drama", and art just can't compete with it.
But people will keep making shows about it, adds Ronay, because football is "commercial catnip", and "something producers and directors would be nuts to ignore".
