The Pitch - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

 ​Set in an Ireland not too far removed from our own, Philip Catherwood’s The Pitch, directed by Thea Mayeux, uses football to explore culture, identity and the possibility of a shared future. At its centre are Robbie (James Grimm), a sports-mad Belfast boy who sees the refurbishment of his beloved pitch into a Gaelic football ground as an invasion of his culture, and Deren (Jake Douglas), a GAA player who sees it as an opportunity to finally play the sport he loves in a place where it was never accepted. As Robbie’s sister Melissa (Dión Di Maio) takes up Gaelic football at school and a United Ireland referendum approaches, the three are forced to confront what they think they know about each other.
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What makes The Pitch work so well is how accessible its central metaphor is. The football pitch is both a literal space to battle over and a representation of the wider divisions between communities. Sport has often been used in theatre and film to mixed effect at times as shorthand for conflict, identity and belonging, but Catherwood makes the pitch feel genuinely contested. Who gets to play there, which sport belongs there and who has the right to call it home become questions that extend far beyond the touchline.

That history gives the play particular weight. For many people in the North of Ireland, GAA was not simply a sport but something that could carry cultural and political significance, and in some communities participation was something that had to be kept quiet or hidden. Yet the GAA has also grown enormously in the North, with clubs, schools and players helping to make Gaelic games an increasingly visible part of everyday life. The Pitch places that history alongside the possibility of a United Ireland, asking what happens when identities that were once kept apart increasingly have to share the same space.

Even if your knowledge of the GAA begins and ends with Normal People or spotting people wearing tiny O’Neills shorts around the place, the play remains instantly accessible. You do not need to understand every rule of Gaelic football to understand what it means to have something you love feel threatened, or what it means to finally feel that something you have been excluded from belongs to you too.

There is also something wonderfully universal about the way The Pitch approaches these questions. Beneath the politics are three young people trying to work out where they fit, what they have inherited and whether those inherited divisions need to define their future. Its fast pace, energy and humour keep the heavier themes from becoming didactic, allowing the questions to emerge naturally through the characters.

It is also the kind of play that feels particularly suited to schools. The Pitch provides an immediate way into discussions about identity, history, culture and Northern Irish politics, while the prospect of a United Ireland referendum gives young audiences a contemporary question to debate rather than a history lesson to absorb. It has the energy to entertain, the simplicity to be immediately understood and enough political and cultural depth to keep the conversation going afterwards. 

Lee Hutchison

4 / 5 

Runs until August 31st at the Pleasance Courtyard