For the next three months Patrick Marber’s new play The Red Lion is in rep at the National Theatre. The good news, for those familiar with the football-drama mini-genre, is that it doesn’t actually have any football in it. This is a promising start. If history tells us anything about the bold, brave, apparently irresistible folly of trying to create a coherent piece of dramatic art based around football, keeping the football itself to a bare minimum is a very sound first principle.
In fact, The Red Lion keeps most things to a minimum. In the course of its two hours the play features three cast members, a single dressing-room stage set and very little actual action, creating in the process a kind of Harold Pinter-meets-Harry Redknapp effect: manly theatrical minimalism cut with some fine lyrical exchanges and a clear and potent evocation of the internal life of English football’s grand old, cobwebbed Victorian infrastructure.
And yet somehow the end result is a bit like sitting down to eat a brilliantly prepared, beautifully accessorised meal prepared by a world-class chef and realising, as the minutes tick by, that there is no actual main course. This is it. We really are having football for dinner. Many of the (very favourable) reviews have already suggested that this is really a play about other things, like desperation, exhaustion and doomed hope. There is undoubtedly something in this. As the clock ticked around past 90 minutes and into the extended soliloquising that clogs the end of the second act, the overriding feelings provoked in this audience member were indeed desperation and exhaustion, albeit sustained by the certain hope that this would, at least, eventually have to end.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the play itself. The writing is brilliant, the dialogue absorbing. The actors are great, particularly Daniel Mays as a very striking and well-drawn portrait of a wheeler-dealer manager. “In here,” he says of football’s cave-like dressing room culture, “it’s a pirate ship.” The problem is simply football itself which, despite its natural dramatic tension and endless roster of heroes and villains, has always been a grudging and uncooperative subject matter for dramatic art. It is probably wrong to say there has never been a good play, film or book about football; but perhaps not that far wrong.
Generally football plays and dramas tend to fall into certain well-worn grooves. These have ranged from a vast amount of hooligan-based filler, to some decent knockabout comedies (Mike Bassett: England Manager) to earnest, awful, uplifting stuff (Bend It Like Beckham, When Saturday Comes) and the odd brilliant sui generis one-off (Gregory’s Girl, the Goalkeeper’s Fear of The Penalty).
Football fiction is similarly patchy. The best is generally the straight stuff, from Michael Hardcastle’s classic series of kids’ books, to Brian Glanville’s beautifully simple and engaging Goalkeepers Are Different. Beyond this, half in and half out, are a smattering of first rate football-flavoured novels, most notably perhaps The Unfortunates by BS Johnson, a wonderfully haunting book about loss and disintegration with a central character who just happens to be a football reporter.
Best of all perhaps are the TV dramas, all the more convincing for having been banged out to short order and forced to tell a story: Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul, about espionage, morals and the 1982 World Cup; the pulp fiction of Sky’s long-running Dream Team; Yesterday’s Hero, written by Jackie Collins and starring Ian McShane as a moodily dipsomaniac maverick footballer in search of one last gig at Leicester Forest.
More often, though, there is simply a feeling of trapped talent about all this, the suspicion that all these mob-handed, carefully budgeted attempts to nag and goad football into a convincing fictional shape would have been better if everyone had just cut their losses and done something about Napoleon, or a group of public schoolboys with an inspirational teacher, or Jennifer Aniston trying to find love.
It isn’t hard to see why this should be the case. On a basic level football just doesn’t need to be made into a drama. It already is a drama – and not a good one either, but a terrible overblown pantomime thing, full of self-contained storylines and big fat cartoonish characters. To translate this into fiction is to make a drama about a drama. You may as well write a soap opera about EastEnders. Better, surely, just to watch EastEnders instead.
With this in mind for those who like football, plays about football will always suffer simply by not being football. Meanwhile for those who like plays or films but not football there will be the usual need to explain, to make football about something, to fluff out and muddy its narrative lines, a process avoided most notably in recent times by The Damned United, which was brilliantly successful both as a book and film simply by letting its story stand alone.
The Red Lion avoids the more familiar staging problems. There is, thank God, no attempt to portray actual football, a sub-genre of dramatic disaster that has its own grisly history. There is no “theatre of the crowd”, no gor blimey we dun arf love our boys stuff. There are no hooligans or by-rote use of the sport as a conduit to talk about racism/sexism/violence/all other forms of human failure. There aren’t any song and dance numbers, as presumably there will be in the forthcoming Bend It Like Beckham musical, an experience that, outside of its target demographic of musical-loving, football-loving football-musical lovers promises to be right up there with gouging your own ears out with a skewer.
It isn’t hard to see why people will keep on making this kind of stuff. For a start plenty of writers share the obsession. Marber, for example, clearly knows his football in fine-point detail, and is an energetic and popular director of Lewes FC of the Isthmian League. Football itself remains commercial catnip, something producers and directors would be nuts to ignore. Plus of course the sport itself just keeps on giving, divvied up from the top down by a masque of B-movie style villains and corrupt dictators. At the end of which it is hard to shake the feeling there is a great, multi-layered, all-consuming football drama out there. It is, quite simply, football itself, the global sport you really couldn’t make up, despite the fact so many continue to try.
