The Wolves (Theatre Works)

A finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, American playwright Sarah Delappe has crafted a portrait of female adolescence through a girls’ soccer team.

The story unfolds as a group of 16 and 17-year-olds has regular work out sessions to prepare for upcoming games.

As the nine youngsters warm up, their discussions are many, varied and far ranging. 

Photos by Steven Mitchell Wright

They include global trouble spots, including genocide in Cambodia under Pol Pot, menstrual products, pregnancy, cancer, relationships, their coach and more.

Several hope to be scouted to play ball in college.

These are regular kids trying to navigate their way in the world, mucking around, mucking up, caring and sharing.

Some are extremely naïve. Some are more confident than others. The goalie has regular anxiety attacks. Some say the wrong things … stupid things. They fall out, scrap and make up.

Differences from the norm are highlighted. For example, one of the girls lives with her mother in a yurt (misspoken in the first instance as yoghurt).

Among the points of conflict is how a bad injury came about. But that pales into insignificance compared to the tragedy that follows, which leaves the team shattered.

Still, what these girls have in common is a love of the round ball game – how appropriate, as The Wolves is staged to coincide with the World Cup.

The work is raucous. Playwright Delappe has inserted a great deal of enthusiastic, overlapping dialogue, in which different groups are talking at the same time. 

And that is where my problem with The Wolves comes in.

While the performances are solid – no question about it – the cavernous space at Theatre Works doesn’t make for easy listening.

Seating is L-shaped, around a synthetic soccer field, surrounded by black curtaining.

I could only readily hear individuals speaking when they were turned to me. The moment their heads turned away, clarity was lost. 

At times that meant that even the tenor of the conversations became little more than a blur of verbiage, which I found frustrating and made the 95-minute running time a long sit.

Subtitles on a TV screen unquestionably helped.

What I did appreciate was the good use of the space at hand for the physical demands of the roles. In other words, The Wolves has been well choreographed.

Girls entered and exited the soccer field through various breaks in the curtaining.

The vigour in the exercising was certainly well translated.

What we see in this play may not always be pretty, but it holds up a mirror to everyday life among youngish females in America (and, arguably, further afield).

It is a work that, I suggest, will have greatest appeal to a younger audience.

Directed by Belle Hansen, it is on at Theatre Works until 20^th June, 2026.