GLUSBURN Institute has revealed the new date for a postponed performance of acclaimed play The Damned United.
The drama, which portrays Leeds United in the 1970s under notorious manager Brian Clough will be at the arts and community centre on June 23.
The play, from renowned theatre company Red Ladder, was originally due to be performed earlier this month.
The audience will be taken into the dressing room, described by author David Peace as a “hateful, spiteful place in dirty, dirty Leeds”, to reveal the drama of those 44 dark days in 1974.
Brian Clough, the enfant terrible of British football, tries to redeem his career and reputation by winning the European Cup with his new team.
It is a team he has openly despised for years, a team he hates and which hates him.
A spokesman said: “The Damned United takes you inside the tortured mind of a genius slamming up against his limits, and brings to life the beauty and brutality of football, the working man’s ballet.”
Anders Lustgarten’s adaptation of Peace’s “brilliant and ingenious” novel is also returning to the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds following its sell-out success, from March 27 to April 7.
It is returning with intimate new staging, bringing audiences up-close to the sweat, fury and power-struggles from pitch-side and inside the flawed but brilliant mind of ‘Old Big ‘ed’.
The Damned United is directed by Red Ladder’s Artistic Director Rod Dixon and performed by a company of three - Luke Dickson (Brian Clough), David Chafer (Peter Taylor) and Jamie Smelt (Sam Longson/Syd Owen/Jack Kirkland and others).
The rights for The Damned United were donated by David Peace to Red Ladder Theatre Company for £3.68 – a penny for each page in the novel – as a show of support for the Leeds-based radical theatre company when it received a 100 per cent cut to Arts Council Funding.
In 2016 Red Ladder and West Yorkshire Playhouse co-produced the world premiere of The Damned United which played to full houses during a five-week sell-out run.
The play has been reworked as a small-scale production for its first tour of the UK, including this Leeds community tour.
Visit gicac.org.uk for further information.
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