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Leeds United fan and playwright Chris O’Connor is clearly Shankly-ian in his belief that football is more important than life or death. He lays out his argument in Through It All Together, which is at once a paean to his football club, a contention that fandom is a glue that binds with more ferocity than a Norman Hunter tackle, and an appeal for the deification of the manager who led Leeds back into the Premier League in 2020.
Where Liverpool had Bill Shankly – recently given his own moment in the stage spotlight in the moving and epic Red or Dead – the Whites had Marcelo Bielsa, or El Loco as O’Connor reminds us, the nickname with which the Argentinian arrived at Elland Road. If there were any doubt as to the regard in which fans like O’Connor hold the manager, a stained glass window bearing the image of Bielsa rises above the stage of Amanda Stoodley’s set.
At the heart of Through It All Together are long-time married couple and Leeds season ticket holders Howard and Sue, played by Reece Dinsdale and Shobna Gulati. Howard is just about living with dementia, wife Sue is coping with it admirably, while daughter Hazel is either in denial or overcompensating when it comes to her dad’s condition.
The trials of having the condition, or living with a family member with it, are intertwined with the season before and the season during which Bielsa’s Leeds United secured promotion – one which was plagued by Covid and lockdown. But the play never lands firmly on either story. Howard’s dementia doesn’t progress to its usual conclusion, leaving Dinsdale, a fine actor, with a curtailed journey, while Bielsa’s two-season odyssey back to the Premier League is told in snippets that the Leeds faithful in the audience clearly loved, but the uninitiated will find have the depth of a highlight reel.
Everal A Walsh and Dean Smith, in roles from podcasters to fans in the pub to club higher-ups, are uniformly hilarious in the very amusingly sketched scenes in which they appear. The play, like the club, will have its fans, but will mean most to those who are already marching on together.
