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I am probably going to hell for pointing this out, but ‘The Greater Game’ is a play so derivative that there isn’t strictly speaking any need for it to exist. It is a drama about patriotic young Englishmen signing up to fight in the First World War and having their innocence – and in many cases, lives – robbed from them by the terrible conflict. The USP is that the lads in question here are professional footballers, the real-life Clapton Orient team who signed up to fight en masse. Not that I realised it was a true story while watching it: nothing in Michael Head’s play is not generic or predictable; everything it has to say was said by ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’ almost 30 years ago.
Is that a reason for avoiding it? Of course not, and in its own slightly plodding way it’s absolutely fine and will jerk the requisite tears come the end. The banteriffic dialogue of its young male leads is largely entertaining, it breaks out into lions-led-by-donkeys righteousness at the appropriate moments, there’s a strangely endearing turn from ’90s telly host Nick Hancock as the team’s avuncular coach, and the whole thing comes sponsored by the Royal British Legion.
Still, there’s something inescapably inept about Tilly Vosburgh’s production, from an early flashback sequence in which the dialogue is almost drowned out by needless traffic noise sound design, to a frustrating lack of detail (the programme tells us far more about the context of the players signing up for the war than the play does). The characters are incredibly thinly-drawn considering they were real people. Maybe the story of the men sacrificed a century ago is one we need to tell ourselves over and over again. But it has been told a lot better than this.