Edinburgh Fringe 2025
The FootballActress
Lucia Mallardi
Genre: Physical Theatre, Solo Play, Theatre
Venue: C venues | C aquila
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Lucia Mallardi tells a deeply personal and emotional story embracing the pursuit of a career in professional female football that led her to Berlin, to the acceptance of a new life as a street and stage artist. The story is enhanced by Lucia’s impeccable skills as a football juggler that guide us through what feels like a road movie touching several European countries.
Review
Lucia Mallardi has a dream: becoming a professional female football player. However, if the male world of professional football is unforgiving and hypercompetitive, female football seems to be, in her tale, even worse, as it is not endowed with the same glamour and economic attractiveness of its male counterpart. In order to pursue this dream, Lucia has to leave everything behind: her hometown, her family, her country.
Divided into different scenes, the play starts with Lucia’s encounter with the harsh reality of the pitch where the football world, although in its female version, is still very much characterised by a male machismo and aggressive spirit. We are introduced to a carousel of characters and, in particular, a ruthless and blunt team coach that could as well be the personification of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket.
Yet, Lucia’s stubbornness prevails and, despite the mockery and passive aggressiveness of her parents aimed at convincing her to stay, she decides to move to Berlin to pursue her dream.
The move to Berlin is the inciting event that leads Lucia to a very personal story, which is made authentic by Lucia’s passion in telling it and also her undoubtedly formidable football skills, shown in beautiful football juggling numbers. It is a very Italian story, as Lucia is Italian herself and at times alternates sentences in her home language to go back to a heavily accented yet very clear English that adds a bit of humour to what would otherwise be a rather dark story.
Had the play been performed by a man, it would have been not that original, to say the least, as we are bombarded daily on social media and television with the biographies of football stars. However, the fact that it is a woman telling us about this sport really captures our attention. Indeed, Lucia’s passion for the sport seems to be pure. Gone are the multimillion-pound contracts; here we witness sheer love for the sport, which is kind of refreshing and leads us to believe there is something more to football than money.
Lucia’s delivery is both energetic and honest. At times this energy could be conveyed in a more controlled fashion, but the sheer authenticity of her performance is utterly engaging and she does seem to have a gift for storytelling.
This is a personal story, but at the same time it describes a sport which is the archetype of any sport, where even not-so-keen football fans are unconsciously glued to a TV screen when countries battle against each other every four years in the World Cup.
Thus, the personal and the universal seem to find a natural balance in the dramaturgical evolution of the play. We are given a personal view, but at the same time we relate to a theme of which we thought we knew a lot. So when the door to a new secret room of a house we thought of knowing very well is opened, we feel a natural pull to enter and discover more.
Overall, the performance is enjoyable and, as we leave the venue, we are not only entertained but also educated about a subject that for the majority of us was pretty much unknown. A good performance and a sincere delivery.
We’ll have to see if Lucia can make the move from personal storytelling to other more difficult feats, but the premises are all there, together with her physical skills as a performer.
