Why I Stuck A Flare Up My Arse For England, Southwark Playhouse (Borough) Review
Alex Hill in Why I Stuck A Flare Up My Arse for England, photo credit: Jack Stacey
Written by Penny for Theatre & Tonic
Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in exchange for an honest review.
In Southwark Playhouse’s Large performance space, the atmosphere is electric. The lighting is low and the bare stage has a backdrop of England flags, some have seen better days, they’ve all seen some action. A couple of crates, also covered with the Cross of St George, and a podium are the only bits of furniture on the set. The writer and performer of Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse for England, Alex Hill, bursts onto the stage accompanied by probably the world’s third or fourth best football song, Vindaloo by Fat Les. The audience gleefully joins in and the stage is set.
The play takes its inspiration from that viral photograph of the England fan who, well, stuck a flare up his arse outside Wembley stadium, but is completely fictionalized. It’s a story about friendship, coming of age and how football can be a brilliant escape from mundane reality, without shying away from its darker side – the racism and thuggery from certain “fans” that is a stain on the beautiful game. We start with Hill’s character Billy talking to a radio show host about why he felt the need to stick a pyrotechnic up his bum (“It was funny”), before flashing back to chart how he ended up on Wembley Way on that fateful day.
Alex Hill has fantastic stage presence and his energy doesn’t drop for the 70 minutes of the performance. Even when his character makes some dubious choices, he still has a charm and charisma that keeps us on side. As well as Billy, whose story is being told, but over the course of the play he takes on other people in Billy’s life – from a crotchety old lady he encounters at work to another football fan, known as “Wine Gum”, an imposing presence and bad influence on this young, impressionable man. The characters are distinct and instantly recognisable. A less developed presence is Billy’s best mate, Adam. This feels deliberate as Adam stays firmly in Billy’s shadow for most of the play. He is presented as a lad with a bright future, doing well at school and starting a promising career in the City, he seems ready to grow up and get on with his life, whilst Billy has a dead end job in his Dad’s hair salon and still lives for “matchday”. Hill makes Billy feel very real and natural, his story believable.
The writing is excellent, setting up Billy and Adam’s friendship, bonded in childhood over their mutual love of football. Strong direction from Sean Turner provides some heartwarming moments early on, the boys opting to share a football signed by England legend Bobby Moore and Adam briefly taking Billy’s hand to support him at his mother’s funeral. There’s also plenty of comedy, in Billy’s description of the huge Wine Gum as “built like a brick shit … mansion” and a sequence in which he takes his girlfriend to see Les Miserables, missing a precious matchday for the alien environment of show tunes set in revolutionary France. Hill takes a seat amongst the audience to show his experience of the Les Mis performance, giving us all a very funny and all too familiar taste of that nightmare theatre-goer who can’t stop playing on his phone, distracting the people around him and the performers!
Flare would be very entertaining if it was just an homage to the beautiful game and the loyalty clubs inspire in their fans. But, as things progress, Billy and Adam fall in with a new group of fans, led by Wine Gum, and slowly their youthful enthusiasm takes a more sinister turn as they get seduced into this new circle’s habits of heavy drinking, drug taking and violence. This behaviour escalates, driving a wedge between Billy and the people who love him – his Dad, girlfriend Daisy and also Adam, who doesn’t want to continue down this path. The writing and performance walks a fine line between criticising and glorifying this hooligan culture, there don’t seem to be any repercussions for Billy until a twist at the climax of the play gives us a gut punch that is delivered with heartbreaking emotion.
Just before we reach that twist, the action takes us back to Wembley Way on the day of the Euro 2020 final, and the infamous flare up arse incident that was first referenced at the start of the play. It doesn’t feel quite so funny now that we know Billy better and can feel the sense of loss underneath this thuggish bravado.
Although the themes it tackles are admittedly not the most original, this is a very well constructed piece of theatre that takes its audience on a rollercoaster ride of emotional highs and lows, whilst painting a clear picture of the impact of peer pressure and toxic masculinity on vulnerable young men. Alex Hill has a very bright future as both a writer and actor, this first play makes me excited to see what he will do next.
Why I Stuck A Flare Up My Arse for England runs at Southwark Playhouse (Borough) until 4th May 2024 before returning to the Edinburgh Fringe and embarking on a UK tour.
Read our interview with writer and performer Alex Hill.