More plays about football.

An Evening with Gary Lineker. Arthur Smith and Chris England. 1990.

An Evening with Gary Lineker is a 1991 stage play and 1994 television film both written by Arthur Smith and Chris England. The action takes place against the backdrop of the 1990 Football World Cup semi-final, between England and West Germany, which is taking place in Italy while Monica and Bill are on holiday in Ibiza. Bill desperately wants to watch the match; Monica wants to talk about their relationship. The play was nominated for an Olivier Award.

A 90-minute television drama, adapted by Smith and England from their playscript, was produced by Andy Harries for Granada Television and aired on 14 June 1994 on ITV just before the start of the 1994 World Cup and was repeated 4 years later during France 98. It starred Caroline Quentin as Monica and Clive Owen as Bill, with the supporting cast including Quentin's then real-life husband Paul Merton as Bill's wet, annoying best friend Ian, who has accompanied them on the holiday to Monica's consternation. Lizzy McInnerny plays Birgitta, a German whom Ian has met in Ibiza, and Martin Clunes plays Dan, a client of Bill's publishing company who is coincidentally in Ibiza too. Gary Lineker makes a cameo appearance and the voice of John Motson is provided by impressionist Alistair McGowan.

 

Elton John’s Glasses: David Farr. 1997.

Bill is a fanatical supporter of Watford F.C. Day after day he sits in his unfurnished flat, watching the 1984 Cup Final with an obsession verging on madness. The video replays the fatal moment when the Watford goalkeeper fumbles the ball and Everton takes a two-nil lead. Bill blames the keeper's mishaps on the glare from Elton John's Glasses. Reconciled to an agoraphobic existence, Bill laments the decline of his beloved team: 'It was there the dream died.'

A comedy about ageing, failure and football, Elton John's Glasses announces the arrival of a talented writer with a rare sympathy for character and relationships. Comedian Brian Conley starred in David Farr's award-winning new play, and directed by Terry Johnson, which first premiered to critical acclaim last June at Watford's Palace Theatre..

Elton John's Glasses deals with a familiarly obsessive subject to many Britons - football. In looking at one man's obsession with Watford Football Club (The Hornets) and their failure to win the Cup Final. Conley plays Bill who hasn't recovered from Watford's 1984 defeat by Everton at Wembley. 

It's now 1996, the fateful day of the last match of the season when relegation looms, and Bill is reliving the agony of the lost cup again. Events take an upward turn with the arrival of Bill's younger brother, members of his rock band and the beautiful Amy who plays a wicked game of football herself. Could there be more to life than just football? 

Elton John's Glasses was winner of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Best Regional Play of 1997.

 

Jumpers for Goalposts. Tom Wells. 2013.

‘I’m not asking you to win. I’m asking you to just: chuck your face at it, have a, have a fucking good go at it. And then we’ll. Yeah. We’ll see.’ Luke wants Danny, but Danny’s got a secret. Joe’s happy in goal but Geoff wants a headline gig. Viv just wants to beat the lesbians to the league title. Game on.

A hilarious and heart-warming story about football, friendship and finding your way from Tom Wells, winner of the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright 2012 for the smash hit comedy THE KITCHEN SINK (***** Telegraph) produced by the Bush.

Jumpers for Goalposts was originally co-commissioned by Paines Plough, Hull Truck and West Yorkshire Playhouse. In 2013, the Bush Theatre presented a Paines Plough, Hull Truck and Watford Palace Theatre production.

 

Old Big ‘Ead in the Spirit of the Man. Stephen Lowe. 2005 

His style was legendary. The last great working-class hero, Cloughie was the man in the green jumper who threw out the rule-book and inspired the men of the Forest to their greatest victories. 

Stephen Lowe's new comedy shows that you can't keep a good manager down - even after a transfer to the Other Side. But in the afterlife of Brian, it's not a team of footballers that's lost in the Forest - and leading a band of theatre-makers to glory is a whole new ball-park. 

A love of the spotlight, an ego the size of a stadium: perhaps Old Big 'Ead always belonged on the stage. Now Nottingham's finest - and Derby's too - proves he's not just the greatest manager England never had, but the greatest stand-up as well. Join us to celebrate the courage, the conviction, the tears and the triumphs - the spirit of the man. 

Since Nottingham Playhouse produced his first major play, the award-winning Touched, Stephen Lowe has enjoyed countless successes on stage and on television - including plays for the Royal Court and RSC, and numerous episodes of Coronation Street. 

Extract from the Nottingham Playhouse Brochure.

Red Saturday: Martin Allen 1983.

Red Saturday is a rare play about football (soccer). The author has taken a mythic plot about the decline of the old star and the rise of the new. But he makes it come alive because he invests it with so much plausible detail.

He focuses on the waxing and waning fortunes of Terry, a 19-year-old midfield player who has come into the team because of injury, and Lee the erratic 31-year-old striker facing up to spending his declining years with FC Bruges. Red Saturday was produced by the Paines Plough Theatre Company. The play toured and played at Hamstead's New End Theatre in the autumn of 1983, and transferred to the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in January, 1984.

It was the winner of the Samuel Beckett Award for the Best First Stage Play performed in 1983. 

Martin Allen (not to be confused with the veteran manager currently at Barnet FC) is now best known as a key writer for Coronation Street. 

However, this classy stage play won him the Samuel Beckett award (though Beckett was more of a cricket fan). Its off-pitch settings – hotel room, team coach, changing room – stage conversations between a rookie player and an old pro, given verisimilitude in the first production by the casting of John Salthouse, an actor who had played professionally for Crystal Palace.

 

Sing Yer Heart of for the Lads: Roy Williams. 2002. 

A controversial new play from the winner of the Evening Standard 2001 Most Promising Playwright Award.  Saturday 7 October 2000. England v Germany, The King George v The Duke of York. Keegan resigns and Barry plays a blinder. Tensions erupt in a South London pub as England lose again.

Roy Williams’s fierce and excoriating portrait of British racism is set in a south-west London pub, during the 2000 England vs. Germany match. As England lose again, their supporters in The King George lose it too – at full time, patriotism has become unapologetic racism.

Fuelling the xenophobic tensions is the blind venom of Lawrie, captain of the pub team; the articulate propaganda of Alan, active member of an anti-immigration party; and the hatred of Glen the landlady’s son, bullied and confused. Williams’s challenging play explores what it means to be British, and how people define it – whether it is a bulldog tattoo, or violence against those who don’t fit in. 

Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads premiered in 2002, and was published to tie in with the opening of the National Theatre "Transformations" new writing season.

 

Studs: Gordon Steel.

It's a play about football. Hence the title, although the sexual meaning isn't inappropriate, given the two preoccupations of the characters. It's about Sunday League football, the home of young wannabes, old has-beens and never-will-best of all ages. And, in particular, it's about one of those teams (and every Sunday League has them) which has never won anything - ever.

It's also about relationships, not just sexual relationships, but between the players Mac, Tommo, and team captain and driving force Ronnie) along with girlfriends: Mandy and Kylie. 

The sentimentality of the piece reaches its climax at the end as Ronnie, whose father had founded the team, straightening a twisted coat peg, looks sadly round the changing room, which is to be demolished the next day by the council, with the strains of Nessun Dorma swelling in the background.

Originally premiered by Hull Truck the play is suffused by a love of "the beautiful game" and is characterised by some very good one-liners and sharply observed dialogue.

 

The Christmas Truce: Phil Porter. 2014.

December 24, 1914. As families across Europe gather to celebrate Christmas, a generation of young men find themselves far away from their loved ones in the trenches of the Western Front. Then, something astonishing happens: the German soldiers are singing Christmas carols. Leaving their trenches, the British soldiers go to meet their enemies; not to fight, but to celebrate Christmas. 

Inspired by a scene in Oh What a Lovely War, Phil Porter’s script faces two problems: a single episode has to be stretched to make a full evening, and there is something contradictory about a “festive” family show about a tragic war.

Porter confronts the first issue by following the progress of men of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as they moved from the world of village cricket matches in the summer of 1914 to the rat-ridden, water-sodden Belgian trenches. Focusing on Bruce Bairnsfather, a native Stratfordian who became a famous cartoonist and whose gung-ho manner conceals a questioning attitude to authority.

Bairnsfather’s story is paralleled by that of a staff nurse in a clearing hospital who similarly rebels against a starchily inflexible matron. But the first half, has an overlong concert party run by the soldiers, to compensate for a sudden loss of life. The second half gets down to the yuletide truce between British and German soldiers: there is something touching in the recognition of a common humanity amid the carnage and the horrifying British high command’s anxiety to curtail ceasefire.

In Porter’s treatment, the German soldiers sing Stille Nacht, their British counterparts quickly join in: at the same moment in Oh What a Lovely War! the Tommie’s reacted with a rude ballad that instantly defused the note of theatrical piety.

But there is something about the tone of the play that worries me. You would never know that more than 100,000 British lives were lost in the first five months of the war. What we have here is a show that echoes the surface exuberance of Oh What a Lovely War! without its savage indignation.

 

The Game: Harold Brighouse. 1914. 

Match Day! Blackton Rovers is in need of money. Owner, Austin Whitworth, sells his star centre-forward - local football hero Jack Metherell - to a rival club on the eve of a crucial match that could see Rovers relegated to the 2nd Division. Will honest Jack do Austin's bidding when asked to throw the match? Or will he put his professional honour above loyalty to his old club? Austin's daughter Elsie, and Jack, are in love - or so they think. But Jack still lives at home, firmly tied to his mother's apron strings. Will Elsie's modern ways and feisty temperament win over his domineering mam? Or is this tryst between the classes doomed from the start?

You don't find many plays about professional football, written in 1913, two years before Brighouse’s famous Hobson's Choice, it's just as enjoyable as its successor, and uses football as a way of exploring class, money, the generation war and what we nowadays call gender politics.

Brighouse's plot is admittedly a bit contrived. But we see Jack, the working-class hero, undergoing a series of moral tests. First, his integrity is severely challenged when Austin asks him to throw the match. And then Jack's manly independence comes under the microscope when Austin's elder daughter, Elsie, seeks to prize him away from the clutches of the domineering mother with whom he lives. 

Part of the play's appeal today is nostalgic: but Brighouse also unsentimentally reminds us of the way soccer players were treated as little more than serfs by their employers and, even if he keeps the crucial game off-stage, he makes up for that with a series of striking personal duels. When Elsie, the irresistible force, meets Jack's mum, the immoveable object, and, on offering to help in the house, is sternly told: "Jack's bed were made up this morning. Do you take me for a slut?"

You could pick holes in Brighouse's plot. But this is still a remarkable play that starts out by exposing the grubby chicanery of professional football and ends by revealing the terrifying power of English working-class motherhood.

 

The Pass: John Donnelly. 2014.

In a high-end hotel room, rising football stars Jason and Ade are living the dream. Goals, girls and glory. Tomorrow, they make their first-team debut. But the game starts before you've even walked out the tunnel. Twelve years. Three hotel rooms. One last gamble. 

When former German international soccer player and sometime English league player Thomas Hitzelsperger came out earlier this month it made headlines not just in the U.K. but around the world. In the macho arena of professional sports in the U.K. and the U.S., coming out is still extraordinarily rare, which makes “The Pass” intensely topical. 

That’s not, however, what makes John Donnelly’s new play so striking. Spanning thirteen years in three hotel rooms over three time periods, the play examines the dreams and fears of seventeen-year-old British white hopeful Jason. In the opening scene, he shares a room with his friend and Nigerian team-mate Ade, also on the brink of major league signing and pumped-up with a near toxic combination of testosterone and tomorrow’s pre-match tension. The lads cannot sleep.

Yet the more wildly they brag and taunt, the more legible Donnelly’s threatening undertow becomes. The tug-of-war tension between them keep stakes grippingly high enough to land a climactic punch.

Neither of the lads reacts as expected and the adroit cut-off of the opening scene — leaving the characters on the cusp of a compromising decision — sets off an emotional chain reaction for the remainder of the play.

There’s an equal air of unease escalating into unspoken threat in the following scene. Jump-cutting seven years, success story Jason is in his hotel room with a motor-mouthed table-dancer Lyndsey. Excited by his fame, she appears to know how to take care of herself, but Donnelly is springing a Mamet-like switch that once again reverses expectations and adds emotional resonance to Jason’s plight.

The final pair of scenes of mounting danger find Jason at 29 living the dream but struggling with the fallout of toxic levels of denial. 

“The Pass” might be mistaken for the standard-issue cost-of-fame scenario familiar from numerous Hollywood models up to and including “A Star Is Born.” Yet for all the wordiness of the bullish dialogue, it’s the underpinning sensitivity and sadness of Donnelly’s adroit rebooting of the format that makes it engrossing. The workings and fallout of internalized homophobia have rarely been so vividly presented.  

The Pass premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in January 2014

 

The Red Lion: Patrick Marber 2015.

Patrick Marber's The Red Lion, is set behind the scenes at a non-league football club. It manages to be more than a football play; continuing Marber's life-long interest in the dynamics of male inter-action. As two very different men grapple for the soul of a boy and of a way of playing the national game. In a tight 95 minutes, it is dark and deep, full of supressed anger.

In a dingy changing room, the smell of liniment and the metaphorical reek of endeavour, essentially the play pivots on two different views of football – and in turn of society itself.

For Yates, the kitman and former club legend, a man who has the Red Lion mascot tattooed on his heart, football represents hope and aspiration; for ambitious club manager Jimmy Kidd, it's a business, a means by which the talented can better themselves. And, for young Jordan, the gifted player caught between their views, it is just a means of expression, an escape from a violent and unhappy life. Each man has a driving need: Jordan's is to play, Yates has to believe, Kidd needs success. Each uses football as a means of definition. The tragedy of the play is that each man in turn allows his own demons to destroy and distort the possibilities of the game they all love.

"You think I'm something special. I'm not," Jordan cries at one point. They all ask too much of sport, without having the moral courage to make equally fierce demands on themselves.

The strength of the play is that all these men are damaged losers, blind to their own weaknesses, seeking to define themselves by something that cannot sustain the weight of their aspirations. In this, it's much more than a play about football; it aspires to describe the difficulties of life itself.

Live Theatre, Newcastle 6 April–6 May 2017. 

 

Tull: Philip Vasili. 2013.

Tull was the first black outfield player in the First Division (as it was then) of the football league, signed on by Tottenham Hotspur in 1909. The play highlights the systematic discrimination Tull faced, including racial abuse, making his success a mighty achievement for a black guy at the beginning of the twentieth century.

When war was declared in 1914, Tull volunteered, only again to face institutional racism. The casting of multi-racial actors, adds poignancy as they are transformed into politicians and army majors, to tell us that military regulations forbid: “any negro or person of colour” becoming an infantry officer. Nevertheless, the play, shows us that such is Tull’s bravery and leadership, that, despite the rules, Tull becomes the first black British officer.

In some brilliant scenes, made all the more upsetting because I could imagine that at least some of the cast’s families had themselves fled war-torn homelands, the play exposes the death, destruction and futility of the First World War. A scene with the officers, reveals the deep class divisions within the army and the wider society. The interests of the men are presented as far removed from that of the officers and the ‘gentleman’.

Running throughout the play, is the theme of the suffragettes campaigning for the vote and the effects of the deadly ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act: letting the women out to recover only to then re-arrest them and start force feeding them all over again. Tull is shown,  to be close to one of Suffragettes.

Vasili, the playwright, spent years researching Walter Tull. Unlike so many ‘heroes’ of the First World War, Tull has remained in obscurity. Vasili wrote the play in part in support of the campaign for Walter Tull to be posthumously awarded the Military Cross.

Tull, Bolton Octagon, directed David Thacker. 21 February–16 March 2013.

 

Zigger Zagger: Peter Terson. 1967.

Zigger Zagger, an early play about football hooliganism and tribalism and charts the emptiness and futility faced by many youngsters when they leave school at 16 only to find themselves in a series of dead-end jobs, if they manage to find employment at all. It is the story of Harry Philton, an ardent fan of his local football team who struggles between the life of sex, violence and drink that football offers contrasted with a stable future offered by an apprenticeship.

Harry is about to leave school at 16 with no qualifications and no interest in anything – except football. His stout-drinking mother wants him out of the house while she entertains a succession of truck-driver "uncles". His friend Zigger Zagger is a football hooligan who goes with him to the Saturday match with the intention of starting a riot. As much as Harry wants to be Zigger Zagger's friend he is unsure that he wants to go down the route of trouble, violence and hooliganism with him.

Other forces from contemporary urban society – include the teacher, the vicar, the youth careers officer, the family, the girls, the magistrate and the army recruiting soldier – also exert their influence on Harry to get him to make something better of his life, and Harry starts to wrestle with his conscience. When his girlfriend runs off with his team's centre-forward when he is transferred to a bigger and richer club, Harry realises that football is an empty sham and he takes up an apprenticeship. 

The action takes place, in front of a terrace of football fans, who’s chants and songs punctuate the lives of Harry and his friends and the football stadium, serves as a dominating presence throughout the play.

Especially written for the National Youth Theatre, it was first performed at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke on Trent, directed by Peter Cheeseman in 1967.

MOORCROFT: Eilidh Loan. 2022.

This is a play that seems custom-built for a mainstage tour. It has popular hit written all over it. A vigorous debut by writer and director Eilidh Loan, it is male-centred working-class comedy in the tradition of Roddy McMillan’s The Bevellers and John Byrne’s The Slab Boys. It is funny yet bittersweet, raucous yet sentimental, angry yet celebratory. If many of its themes feel familiar, it makes for no less of a good night out.

Working in Loan’s favour is the truth of her story. Had this been fiction, she would have had to tone down the litany of tragedies that befall the seven young men who form an amateur football team in 1980s Renfrew, near Paisley. The production is driven by a tremendous life force, not least because of its crisply executed choreography, but the play is stalked by death.

Moorcroft is inspired by the recollections of Loan’s father, Garry, 54, a keen footballer in his youth. He is played by Martin Docherty, wiry, fly and fast-talking, as a man looking back at the squad he brought together as a Tuesday-night escape from dreary lives in Thatcher’s Britain.

Loan doesn’t say where fact and fiction meet, but the parka worn on stage by Kyle Gardiner’s bright-eyed Sooty, a young victim of cancer, is the very coat treasured by a real-life friend of her father’s. We can assume the team’s trajectory from optimism to despair distils the experience of many young men struggling against the odds.

Certainly, the play’s themes are real. Loan works in set-piece speeches about race, homosexuality and cancer as she considers the men’s vulnerability to mental illness. Yes, it is convenient that every off-colour remark is countered by an enlightened liberal argument, but Loan’s humanism pushes the play towards a touching portrayal of men who love each other even if they lack the language to say so.

What they do have is the language to cajole, mock and make merry, a characteristic Loan captures brilliantly in a script that is as funny in execution as it is serious in purpose. Happily, this is a team effort and her excellent ensemble power home the goals.

Moorcroft ran at The Tron Theatre, Thu 17 Feb – Sat 5 Mar 2022.

Eilidh Loan | National Theatre of Scotland (nationaltheatrescotland.com)