Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads
at Birmingham Repertory Theatre * * * * *
Review by Terry Grimley
Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads offers an uncomfortable critique of British attitudes to race and football.
Originally staged at the National Theatre in 2002, Roy Williams' stunning play has been revived by Yorkshire-based Pilot Theatre for this national tour.
Its arrival in Birmingham four years after its premiere is significant, because it was in a pub in the city that Williams witnessed the incident that became the starting point for the play – the arrival of a group of raucous England supporters during a televised international who introduced an atmosphere of latent racism and violence.
The pub in the play, the King George, is in south-west London, despite the landlord Jimmy's allegiance to West Ham. Members of the pub football team are gathering to watch England v Germany, the last international at the old Wembley in 2000.
Mark, a black ex-soldier and old flame of Jimmy's daughter Gina, has turned up after a long absence to look for his brother Barry, the two-goal hero of the pub team's match that day.
In contrast to Mark's wariness, Barry is keen to demonstrate his Englishness by matching his white team-mates' crude patriotism and xenophobia, but it is soon clear that there is some ambivalence in their apparent acceptance of him.
In a mirror-image of Barry's equivocal relationship with the other players, Gina's teenage son Glen affects the supposedly cool but actually loutish behaviour of two black friends, who treat him with scarcely concealed contempt.
Lee, an off-duty policeman, is keeping a wary eye on his brother Lawrie, an uncomplicated racist on a short fuse, while in the background Alan, a bookish and soft-spoken activist for a far right party, plays a subtler game.
Taking full advantage of the unusually large cast made possible by the National Theatre commission, Williams has created both an exceptionally exuberant and edgy theatrical experience and a remarkable, multilayered exploration of the meaning of racism in early 21st century Britain.
It's an astonishing tour de force which cleverly uses the symbolism of England losing to Germany at Wembley as a metaphor for a nation uneasy in decline (though Williams did not know what the score would be when he chose the setting).
With its sustained atmosphere of latent violence, its portrayal of English males as over-testosteroned and under-educated and its obscene language (Benny's fantasy about what he would like to do to the England captain's wife in the event of his failing to score is apparently lifted direct from the supporters in the Birmingham pub) it is not for the faint-hearted.
It's a practical demonstration of the old cliche that theatre has a role to illuminate and disturb as well as entertain.
Director Marcus Romer and his company deliver a terrific ensemble performance, but I have to single out Deka Walmsley for making Alan as convincingly creepy a character as you are likely to see in the theatre this year. Unfortunately, presumably in acknowledgement to his Birmingham inspiration, Williams has chosen to make him an Aston Villa supporter.n Running time: Two hours, ten minutes. Until Saturday.
