Review: ENG-ER-LAND, Arcola Theatre

A teenager in a Coventry City shirt bounces on to the stage, all energy with nowhere to go and anxiety about her looks. She talks to us, a bright girl, Midlands accent, mixed race, oversharing the way confident-but-not-confident kids do. We like her - the enthusiasm is infectious, we want her to win but there probably isn’t a play if she does (but, spoiler alert, in real life she actually does!)

Hannah Kumari re-evaluated her acting career during lockdown and wrote her one-woman play, a monologue about her alter ego's love for her football team, for Gina G and for her sense of place in a confusing world - she’s a writer who will be worth keeping an eye on as she grows into her new role. For now, she’s still an actor too and still (I’m pleased to hear) a Cov supporter.

It wasn’t an easy hand to play 25 years or so ago, as we find out in her tale of a girl exploring her identity and football fandom in the 90s. She does not feel Indian like her mother, nor Scottish like her father, nor middle class like her grammar school classmates. She frets about being not thin enough (a subtle but important variation on fretting about being too fat), she wants whiter skin and blonder hair, but she also wants to fit in with the more traditional Indian women a generation or two older. She is a citizen of the world, once, cruelly and unforgivably dismissed as a citizen of nowhere by Theresa May.

She finds a psychological home at Highfield Road, cheering on Dion Dublin and co as they perform yet another great escape at the end of the 1996-97 season. She wants her friends to feel it too, but their commitment is less firm and they slide away to join a clique of mean girls led by a racist Regina George figure. Football’s dark side engulfs her and she’s luck to survive.

The show teems with beautifully observed detail and, take it from someone who was there at the time, Kumari, unlike her hero, Darren Huckerby, never puts a foot wrong - on the football stuff at least. I wasn’t there for the racism (well, I was, but as an observer and not a target, which is very different indeed) but it feels true, neither overstated in its presentation nor underplayed in its impact.

The iniquitous stare saying “Your kind don’t belong here”, the shouts from the crowd targeting black players, the strange absence of people who look like her on the field and around her. And, eventually, its violent expression by racist thugs, fascists always wedded to the jackboot as they have no arguments that stand a moment’s scrutiny.

If the play is perhaps a little too spare as a pure monologue - one feels an interlocutor would animate the always sparky conversations and a few more props would supplement the splendid CD Walkman and early DTPed programmes - it never less than a delight over its pacy 60 minutes or so, with just enough room to wedge in some excellent jokes that work perfectly for a audience with knowledge of the 25 years that have passed since that 0-0 kept Cov up.

But it made me think again too. The seductive quality of a shared culture is a real, and dangerous, beast. I even felt it myself a few months ago, walking to Ibrox Park amongst an almost exclusively white, male, working class throng. All that education, all that political perspective and those years of metropolitan gentrification melted away and I felt as I did aged 21, going home and away as Everton soared to the title. I knew I shouldn’t have fallen for it, because there was a lot of bad stuff associated with football fans back then - but atavistic feelings are hard to dispel with mere thoughts. It was a good feeling in my heart if a dubious one in my head.

On the way home, I pondered the isolated teenage boys in their bedrooms, drawn in by the culture of gaming communities and, subconsciously (sometimes anyway) being groomed by neo-fascist organisations; of those who fall for the easy answers of Andrew Tate’s misogynistic othering of women; of the older men (and women) who gorge on Daily Mail headlines screaming “Traitor” and “Enemies of the People”. I thought too of the politicians in senior positions who are happy to go along so cynically with the fanning of such Culture War divisions. And I thought of the coda to “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” in Cabaret - “Do you still think you can control them?”

Things are much better inside and outside football grounds in 2023 for girls like Hannah; whether they are in the wider world is a more open question - and it really shouldn't be.

Eng-Er-Land at the Arcola Theatre until 19 August 

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