Award winning Leeds United play at Scarborough Spa

The Damned United, Scarborough Spa, Thursday November 1 at 7.30pm

Directed by Red Ladder’s artistic director Rod Dixon and adapted from David Peace’s novel by award-winning playwright Anders Lustgarten, this acclaimed play sees a cast of three performing Peace’s gripping story about Brian Clough‘s disastrous 44-day period as manager of Leeds United.

A sell-out success when it received its world premiere in 2016, The Damned United is touring nationally for the first time.

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A stripped-back new staging performed by Luke Dickson (Brian Clough), David Chafer (Peter Taylor) and Jamie Smelt (Sam Longson/Syd Owen/Jack Kirkland et al) brings audiences up-close to the sweat, fury and power-struggles from pitch-side and inside the flawed but brilliant mind of ‘Old Big ‘ed’.

It is 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 which hates him. Don Revie’s Leeds.

Originally co-produced with the West Yorkshire Playhouse, 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.

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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.

Rod Dixon, artistic director of Red Ladder, says “As a story The Damned United has it all –passion, power struggles, tragedy and a classic anti-hero in Clough - which lends itself brilliantly to theatre.”

Tickets: 01723 821888