Long-form Review: The Beautiful Game

The players are warming up, running up and down the stage, rallying us as we walk in. Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse's football drama Same Team [★★★★] returns to Traverse after its run in December 2023. The play centres on a soccer team of five women, each with lives that have spiralled out of control – from a stint in prison to the pressures of caring for a relative with Alzheimer's disease. Now, improbably, they are going to Milan to represent Scotland in the Homeless World Cup.

Same Team blends social realism with the jeopardy of tournament football, like Ken Loach directing a sports movie. The play takes a little while to find its feet, dribbling through each social challenge faced by each character and tripping on exposition. But it all pays off in the second half. As the competition progresses, the football matches fold into the action with effective staging, injecting energy like a well-timed substitute.

Fan/Girl | Photo by Stefan Willhoit

At primary school, in late-90s Hertfordshire, Bryony Byrne was part of a girls' football team which seemed such a subversion of gender expectations it warranted an article in the local newspaper. Byrne revisits her former teammates in Fan/Girl [★★★], at Summerhall, to explore if their passion for football continued. The show expands this fragment of personal history to comment on gender expectations and teenage conformity. It's a brilliant idea. The trouble is Byrne is full of good ideas and the documentary potential competes for a place with delightful prop-heavy comedy chaos and an understandable obsession with football-philosopher Eric Cantona – the drawback is that it's like watching an entire team of flair players, exciting until possession is lost. The reliance on audience participation loses some of the show's momentum today, but despite its tactical flaws Fan/Girl is laugh-out-loud funny while quietly commentating on those essential, vital, parts of ourselves that we sometimes leave behind in childhood. 

The Ghost of White Hart Lane | Photo by Rob White

Over at Underbelly, The Ghost of White Hart Lane [★★★] focuses on former Scottish international John White, who played for Tottenham in their glory years of the early 60s and died in 1964 after being struck by lightning. The play is from the perspective of his son, Rob, who never knew his father, only the legend. It gently touches on masculinity, effectively conveying the absence of a father and the ideal that can form in a child's mind in place of the warts-and-all man. While the dramatic material is limited by biography, Martin Murphy's script and actor Cal Newman's performance, seamless and charismatic as both father and son, allows two lifetimes worth of material to shuttle back and forth within a Fringe hour. It's a play Scotland and Spurs fans will particularly enjoy and acts as a lovely complement to Rob White and Julie Welch's thoughtful book.

Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse For England | Photo by Rah Petheridge

Kicking off his play with a similar energy to the Jack Cade scenes of unstoppable, impossible, confidence in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, Alex Hill's football yob Billy returns to Edinburgh to revive the 2023 hit Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse For England [★★★★]. The play transforms the viral 2021 news story (about the England football fan demonstrating his patriotism by firing pyrotechniques from his bum) into an in-depth character study, turning the stereotypical ideas we might hold about a football hooligan into a three-dimensional individual. An individual who's vulnerable with a relatable need to conform, fit in and win approval. As Billy gets drawn deeper into factions of football-related violence, he becomes estranged from those closest to him, taking them for granted along the way. As more layers are revealed – about Billy, his family, his friends – the script acutely understands how someone can lose themselves into a subculture. The play develops into unexpected beauty, passing from the ugliness of hooliganism to how two boys first fall in love with 'the beautful game'.