Bottleneck

Greg Williams is a 14 year-old schoolboy in late 1980s Liverpool. He’s a typical teenage lad: obsessed with girls, football and action movies (in his case Die Hard), and constantly fighting with his father (his mother having shacked up with a "big gay photographer" in Crosby). Greg’s horizons start at ‘the Boot,’ the working-class housing estate where he lives with his dad, and end at Anfield, the hallowed home of his beloved Liverpool FC.

The Boot is a place where children like Greg grow up fast. We meet him bouncing a football and complaining that Sarah Jane’s "fanny smells like quavers." He longs to emulate his father and grow a moustache – although he has less time for his dad’s militant politics.

Bottleneck is essentially a coming-of-age tale; Catcher in the Wirral, if you like. Over the course of an hour we watch Greg go from ebullient youngster to scarred adult after a harrowing afternoon on the terraces at the Hillsborough disaster.

James Cooney excels as Greg, marrying physicality with a pronounced sense of pathos, while Luke Barnes’s script fizzes with sharp lines and adroit cultural references (Reliant Robins, replica Liverpool shirts sponsored by Candy). The cramped Attic space in the Pleasance adds to the sense of claustrophobia during the Hillsborough scenes.

The dénouement is telegraphed a little too clearly, and the narrative would have probably benefited from longer between-scene pauses to allow Cooney and the audience to draw breath, but Bottleneck remains a tight, thought-provoking, well-produced piece of contemporary theatre.