Review: Last Goal Wins, Broadway Theatre, Catford, ★★★★½

Broadway Theatre Catford is an art deco gem: stunning lines and glorious stained window pieces, sitting in a Catford that consistently ranks among London’s more deprived areas. That contrast felt worth holding onto on press night. Before the play began, Broadway’s Principal Producer Carmel O’Connor spoke about Catford voices deserving to be heard, and the hope that opportunities like this season can bring to the borough.

Last Goal Wins, by Justice Ezi, opens the Ryan Calais Cameron Season, a new development and production partnership between Cameron and Broadway Theatre that is giving three early-career Black and Global Majority writers from Lewisham a full production run in the Studio this summer and autumn. Press night continued with further speeches from Lewisham’s new Green mayor Liam Shrivastava, Cameron himself and Ezi. Cameron, visibly moved at having a season named after him in the borough where he grew up, called it “the beginning” and “a statement of intent”, and urged the audience to keep putting back into work like this if it is to survive.

The set is simple but effective, some dressing room seats and Nigerian flags. The audience is drawn in from the start, with the players on stage before the play proper begins, playing kicks with each other and with the audience. Halfway through, a “sweet mother” chant turns the Studio into something closer to a stadium end than a black box.

The play itself follows Victory (Benjamin Akintuyosi) and Youssef (Alexander Lobo Moreno), two young footballers competing for the final places on the Nigerian squad ahead of the World Cup, each convinced this is finally their moment. Then a last-minute recruit arrives: Michael D’Arcy (Cameron Forrest), an Arsenal player who was born in Lagos, a surprise call-up who could just as easily have chosen England. His presence changes everything.

Youssef’s own position turns out to be more complicated than it first appears. He carries dual Nigerian and Moroccan heritage himself, cannot speak the language when he visits his family’s village in Nigeria, and would, if we are honest, rather be playing for Morocco. It is a detail that deepens the whole nationality question the play keeps asking, and stops the story becoming a straightforward contest between Michael and everyone else.

What struck me most is how careful Ezi is not to let anyone off the hook. No character here is straightforwardly right. Victory and Youssef have put in years of daily grind on uneven pitches, training by generator light, and there is real anger in the sense that Michael can simply walk in. But Michael’s own reaction, genuine shock that his heartfelt wish to represent Nigeria is met with a wave of hostility on social media, only underlines how little guile he has. One line lands particularly hard: “You’ve taken the one thing I can claim as my own.” It is not really about a place in the team. It is about the fact that Michael has a choice at all.

Review: Last Goal Wins, Broadway Theatre, Catford, ★★★★½ — Cameron Forrest, Alexander Lobo Moreno, Benjamin Akintuyosi

Zanza (Kossim Osseni) and Coach Kamso (Jerome Ngonadi) share a history that includes taking a stand against Shell together as young professionals. That past gives real weight to where they have each ended up now, on opposite sides of a fresh argument about the company’s involvement in the sport, one of them weary enough to admit “I am tired of doing the right thing.” It is one of the play’s better double acts, two old teammates who clearly still respect each other even as they disagree.

There is a strong family strand running underneath all of this too, split between two of the players. Youssef’s father is chasing a footballing career of his own through his son, and their relationship carries real strain because of it. Victory, meanwhile, is dealing with a health scare closer to home, one that shapes decisions on and off the pitch. It gives the play a heaviness that roots it in real lives.

Ezi does not shy away from the uglier history either, touching on real incidents of racism directed at African players, and sitting alongside a sharper strand about Shell’s history in the Niger Delta and what it might mean for the team to accept the company’s sponsorship. It would have been easy to make this speechy. It largely isn’t.

Kalungi Ssebandeke, making his directing debut at Broadway Theatre after winning the JMK Directing Award in 2023, keeps the pace tight. The football never feels like an excuse for the identity questions underneath it. It is the mechanism through which they get asked.

This is a genuinely accomplished debut and a confident way to open a season built around giving new voices room to be fully realised. Ezi is an exciting new voice. Hearing the next two, and what comes out of Lewisham next, will prove the depth of talent within this borough.

1956 Shell strikes Nigeria’s first commercially viable oil in Oloibiri (now Bayelsa State).
1958 Shell begins operations in Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta.
1960 Nigeria gains independence and joins FIFA the same year.
1980 Nigeria hosts and wins its first Africa Cup of Nations title, in Lagos.
1990 Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaders form MOSOP to campaign against oil-industry exploitation of their homeland.
1994 Nigeria wins a second AFCON title and reaches its first World Cup, beating Bulgaria and Greece before losing to Italy in extra time.
1995 Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists, the “Ogoni Nine,” are executed after a widely condemned trial; Nigeria is suspended from the Commonwealth the same day.
2008–2009 A decades-old Shell pipeline ruptures twice at Bodo, a Niger Delta fishing village, spilling an estimated 600,000 barrels of crude into the creeks over months and destroying the community’s fishing and farming livelihoods.
2015 After years of legal battles, Shell pays $83.2 million in compensation to the Bodo community (roughly $3,000 per family) though the promised clean-up remains incomplete years later.
27 April 2014 Villarreal fans throw a banana at Barcelona’s Dani Alves; he picks it up, peels it, and eats it before taking his corner; the incident that made the banana a recognised symbol of racism in the sport.

Photos credit: Derrick Kakembo

[Thank you to Broadway Theatre and Fourth Wall PR for the press tickets for an honest review].

The Ryan Calais Cameron Season, Broadway Theatre, Catford (1 July – 25 October 2026)

Last Goal Wins by Justice Ezi, 1–12 July 2026
A high-stakes football drama following two footballers competing for a place on the Nigerian national team when a surprise late call-up changes everything.

Cranes by Demi Wilson-Smith, 23 September – 4 October 2026
An autobiographical solo piece about protest, the criminal justice system, and the personal cost of activism.

How to Keep Warm in Winter by Kaleb D’Aguilar, 14–25 October 2026
Set in 1973, a Jamaican newlywed couple, Irene and Everton, navigate racism and economic hardship while building a life in London.

Tickets/info: Tickets/info: https://www.broadwaytheatre.org.uk/the-ryan-calais-cameron-season/

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