London theatre to host new League of Legends esports play

There’s enough drama in competitive League of Legends to turn it into a stage show – and one theatre company is doing just that.
The play – titled Cotton – promises a ‘dizzying, manic trip into the world of professional gaming’.
It’s written by Alex Benjamin of theatre company The Peaceful Defeat and will take place in London’s VAULT Festival at the Waterloo East Theatre in February.
The blurb is as follows: “When their team disbands after a devastating loss, three professional gamers are thrown back into a life that never made sense to them. They’ve got to make it in the real world – but how much of a ‘real world’ is there left for them?”
The play features a young cast and a jazz soundtrack; it hopes to draw audiences into the frantic world of esports and explore people’s relationship with video games.
 

“It’s both a cutting-edge piece of fringe theatre and an affectionate tribute to games and why we play them.”
Alex Benjamin, The Peaceful Defeat

 
Writer and director Alex Benjamin said: “There’s not really been a lot of meaningful portrayals of pro gamers in media; you get a lot of company puff pieces or ones that treat it as weird and alien, but not a lot that are really willing to engage with these people’s lives.
“With ‘Cotton’ we wanted to take our audience right into the heart of that world. It’s both a cutting-edge piece of fringe theatre and an affectionate tribute to games and why we play them.”
The Peaceful Defeat are fresh from a five-star run at London’s Camden Fringe and a stop-over in their home town of Exeter.
Cotton has already pulled in solid reviews from its last London run back in August, with acclaim from The Open Door, LondonTheatre1, London Pub Theatres and Mark Ravenhill.
The show runs from February 14th to 18th at Waterloo East Theatre, Brad St, Lambeth, London SE1 8TN from 6.05pm. The Saturday Matinee show takes place at 3pm.
Tickets cost £8 and can be bought from the VAULT Festival website.

Dom Sacco

Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.

As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.