Through It All Together

“I’ve always felt it’s been difficult to translate football onto the stage in the past,” says Chris O’Connor. It’s one of the concerns he had when writing Through It All Together, a play about a couple — Howard and Sue — who are living with dementia and happen to be massive Leeds fans. The piece has been described as a love letter to Marcelo Bielsa and is set between 2018 and 2020, the halcyon days of his time at Leeds United.

“It’s my job to write plays and write things that excite me, and I just knew that I wanted to do something about Bielsa’s Leeds,” O’Connor says. “It was different to any other era as a fan. Even talking about it now, I can feel, you know, there’s hair on the back of my neck tingling.”

Like any conversation in which Bielsa is mentioned, we become immediately at risk of allowing it to hijack the entire thing. We exchange stories about encountering him out in public. “It was as close as I’ve had to a religious, not religious, but it felt like a religious experience,” says O’Connor. “It just felt like it was different. It was hard to distinguish, because a lot of people think we’re crazy. But you had to experience it to know what it felt like.”

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