Football is coming home for Alex Hill’s one-man play for a third and final season on the fringe and you can see why it has proved such a hit. The setting is the delayed Euro 2020 tournament, the one in which Gareth Southgate’s England beat ancient rivals Germany, then Ukraine and Denmark before facing Italy at Wembley.
For an obsessive fan such as Billy Kinley, someone who lives for football and its attendant culture of booze and thuggery, it is an excitement almost too great to bear. That is as close a reason as he can come up with for pulling down his shorts and shoving a flare between his bum cheeks on match day. It is an act of exuberance that turns him into a viral sensation.
It also gives him cause to wonder how his life has reached such a place, especially now he has been abandoned by his childhood pal Adam and dumped by his previously tolerant girlfriend. If he knew the phrase toxic masculinity, he would have to use it; a once sweet-natured boy, he has traded his old stability for the camaraderie of the terraces and the excesses of drugs and violence. The flare is his way of belonging.
Under the direction of Sean Turner, Hill plays Billy with gusto. In the working-class tradition of Steven Berkoff and John Godber, he gives a have-your-cake-and-eat-it performance that revels in macho exuberance even while it delivers a sobering message about communication breakdown.
The details of that breakdown are slipped in teasingly. It feels like there is more to be said about Adam’s fate and the degree to which Billy should be held accountable for failing to listen to his friend. It is a boisterous play about boisterousness, one that will keep knocking in the goals for audiences, even if it says more about the thrill of the hooligan lifestyle than the emotional inarticulacy behind it.