It is July 2021. The Euros’ final between England and Italy is about to kick off. Ardent football fan-turned hooligan Billy McKinley, bedecked with the obligatory three lions on his grubby polyester shirt, is about to stick a flare where it is not designed to be stuck. The question Billy’s depressed and bewildered best friend Adam poses is, “why would you do that?”
The obvious answer is the sixteen pints of lager and three grammes of coke Billy has consumed over the course of the day. There is a more complex answer too, one which writer and performer Alex Hill seeks to tease out in his comedy-drama Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse For England. Sixty minutes on, you may feel this deeper answer remains tantalisingly out of reach. That said, there is fun to be had on the way.
Hill’s Billy starts out as a normal teenager whose main interest in soccer is a Sunday kickabout in the local south London park. But then his mum dies and by way of consolation his dad gives him a football signed by an England star. “It is like taking money from your Nan” the boy says as he gratefully grasps the prized trophy; “you feel guilty, but you want it all the same.”
Spurred on, Adam and Billy become firm Wimbledon fans. Adam, who is brighter, saner, and less suggestible than Billy aces his A-levels. Billy fails his and is reduced to doing odd jobs in his dad’s hair salon where, he tells us, the customers have scowling, crumpled up faces “like spunky tissues”.
A chance visit to a local pub sees the boys encounter hardened hooligans Wine Gum, Elton, and Beaver. Billy gets himself a coke habit and a girlfriend called Daisy. Adam gets a job in the City. Billy learns that if you cannot “do the business on the pitch then you do it off the pitch”. Punch-ups and black eyes become a regular adjunct to the obligatory weekend hangovers. Broken ribs and a visit to A&E soon follow. Something has to give. Unexpected tragedy follows.
There are echoes in Hill’s narrative of Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s dazzlingly ambiguous 2020 state-of-the-nation monologue, Death of England. As with that show, we are invited to empathise with a thuggish working class loser who is simultaneously grotesque and oddly likeable. Yet the explanation Hill offers up for Billy’s descent into brutality – grief, a desire for power and respect, and a need to belong – denies us sufficient justification for any feeling of empathy here. His answers are too simplistic and unconvincing for that.
Where Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse For England works best is in its moments of broad comedy. The hooligan’s sheer bafflement on an outing to Les Misérables is a moment of priceless comic charm.
Writer: Alex Hill
Director: Sean Turner
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