Description

When Don Revie took over this club, Leeds were a rugby league town. No interest in football. Gates under 10,000. We’d never won a thing. He built one of the great clubs of English football, one of the great teams of English football, from scratch on barren ground from nothing more than spirit and fight and nous, which are the exact same qualities you used at Derby. And out of jealousy, you never tried to understand that. Never tried to make the most of that. Sad.

1974. Brian Clough, the enfant terrible of British football, tries to redeem his managerial career and reputation by winning the European Cup with his new team, Leeds United. The team he has openly despised for years, the team he hates and that hates him. Don Revie’s Leeds.

A West Yorkshire Playhouse and Red Ladder Theatre Company co-production, adapted from David Peace’s ingenious and much-lauded novel, which was subsequently made into a film starring Michael Sheen, 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 stage adaptation of David Peace’s novel received its world premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse on 3 March 2016.

Publisher Review

In his novel, Peace has created a character who seems infinitely more human and "real" than those who appear in any number of non-fiction books - it is quite an achievemen * Scotsman on the original novel of 'The Damned United' * Lustgarten's script captures the complexity of Clough as a flawed hero - there is self-belief verging on arrogance but also passionate vision and the thin-skinned vulnerability of a player whose promising career on the field ended prematurely * Yorkshire Post * Anders Lustgarten's compellingly strange, thoroughly theatrical adaptation makes Clough a kind of tragic antihero, a Richard III of the dugout, impelled to ruinous overreach by the same instincts that take him to triumph. * The Times * Peace's unique vision is well translated to the stage. * Exeunt *