I loved it. The most important thing about this production of Love it if We Beat Them is how excellent that this play is. That’s not just because it mentions NUFC and thus triggers my automatic Pavlovian response to sing along, although I did join in with a couple of chants, but because it’s well written, well produced and superbly acted. The other thing is the question of whether glorious defeat is better than a professional victory. Whether a purity of philosophy that frustrates the achievement of power can be justified to the poor, the jobless, the multitudes who need something better, even if it’s not quite the 5-0 thrashing that we all crave. It also poses an even more difficult question of how a good team is made up of many parts and the leadership of that team listens to all and includes all.
This play is so much more than a humorous look at football and politics and the ridiculous behaviour that people indulge in pursuit of both, this play encompasses the whole glory, pain, tragedy and triumph of individual, family and community lives. It’s funny and wise and dark and it spares no feelings and doesn’t leave anyone unscathed by accusations of error or compromise but it has a comic deftness that sweetens the truth of our imperfect humanity. I liked its references to our long history of civic and regional defeats tempered by the odd near miss, like 1996 and the fainter echoes of our old granddad’s victories. The last victory in the league was in 1927 and the last FA Cup 1955, so anyone who has seen Newcastle United win a domestic trophy as a 20 year old, will now be 89 years old which makes Labour Party “supporters” look like glory hunters in comparison. The play’s irresistible indulgence in our regional resistance from Bernician warriors at Heavenfield, St Cuthberts banner at Flodden, and the 50th Division to Sir Les Ferdinand’s scoring power all reference the mighty legends who weep consoling tears on our shoulders or march along with us, depending on the circumstances.
The women
The play also comes with a powerful corrective to the masculine history of football and politics. Here the women are mighty; they suffer but still bear the unbearable, literally. But we’ll get to that. The New Labour insurrectionist candidate Victoria, played with alarming credibility by Eve Tucker, still in 1996, cannot reveal her own sexual orientation for fear of electoral defeat. Jean, the wife of Len, Old Labour Marra, played incredibly well by Jessica Johnson is scarred by her stillborn son still mourning, weeping and needing therapy, yet carries on helping others, consoling, loving and bearing it. This is the largely untold female history of our land, the strength, beauty, invincible love and all consuming devotion confronts anyone who came for the sporting nostalgia and corrects them without the need for rancour. It means that as well as Keegan, Ginola, Tino and Tony Blair, the women of the North who scrubbed the backs of their men, who fed all in the Great Strike and mobilised for their men and honoured them, even when they were defeated, with Women against Pit Closures is properly remembered here. Ask your mammy and she’ll smile with her eyes and tell you.
Football – and life and death
The play starts quietly with a game of pool. Clever stage design has a CIU Club pool table symbolise community, conflict, the land, the sea, a therapist’s couch, even St. James Park and still be a pool table. The lead actor, Len, played by our own David Nellist with his customary casual brilliance, got my award for shot of the championship for the crafty little cannon to pot his ball in the corner and stole our heart as he revealed his Northumbrian soul as he prayed to God for an easy away win. Well we’ve all been there, and nowt happens. The final member of the quartet is Michael, played by the superb Daniel Watson, as a Sunderland supporter trying to keep going when the pit closes, his job ceases and he’s hungry and skint. He was out for a year with the lads in the strike and got nothing but words for his faith and fortitude, and his outrage at being called the filthiest name of them all, a “scab” is memorable. His pursuit of hope, trying to find a job, a place where he can just be happy, buy a house, start a family or even afford his round at the club is far more important than Newcastle United’s pursuit of the Championship, especially to him reminds us of Kinnock’s lesson not to play politics with people’s lives. That seeing your team getting beat is nothing compared to losing your job and it never ever will be. The fierce socialist Bill Shankly was joking when he said that football was more important than a matter of life and death, but football can help us bear both things better than most other consolations and the progress football fans have made with anti-racism, anti-homophobia and anti-poverty are bandwagons that many in politics from Jeremy Corbyn to Keir Starmer, both Arsenal fans, have tried to jump on with little success.
Slight criticisms – only slight
I’ll touch on a couple of things that grated only slightly. I doubt any candidate for the Labour Party, no matter how “new”, would have a good word for Ramsay Macdonald and in Seaham where the pool table was the seaside; where he was defeated by Manny Shinwell in 1935. There, they’d rather talk about “their” Lord Byron or the set of Aliens, and South Shield’s own John S Clarke’s mocking obituary says all you need to know “Here lies Ramsay Mac, A friend of all humanity, Too many pats upon his back inflated Ramsay’s vanity, The Blarney-stone he oft-times kissed and here he lies in glory, For having lived a Socialist, he died a Bloody Tory.” Similarly Len’s union donation to Sinn Fein would not be something kept secret by the recipients, and the device to place a skeleton in his cupboard need not be so cumbersome. These are minor things and the whole play could be taken up by anyone anywhere in the world and local sporting ideologies and political machines substituted and the universal themes within compared and contrasted to great effect.
Hope, triumph and teamwork
We all need hope and we all relish triumph. But both are imposters without good lives and decent jobs and politics, the peaceful implementation of ideas within society, will always come with compromises as all of us are humans with faults. I’ve met Tony Blair and Kevin Keegan; they are both charismatic men, especially the latter, if Keegan asked, I think we’d have marched, I would have done anyway. But both had the sense to have a team with left, right and centre. Blair had John Prescott and Gordon Brown and said that Old Labour was the platform for New Labour and they needed each other; Keegan had Terry Mac as he “Buffer” in the Dressing room. Both had the strength to appreciate that they didn’t know everything and to listen to competing voices. In an uncertain world, certainty in politics or football is rarely successful. Romantic expressive football was tried by Ossie Ardilles, and we nearly got relegated to the Third Division as a result. Unity against adversity is something football does every week but seems to need a defensive war to achieve in politics. If there’s a lesson here maybe it’s that we can’t find progress without everyone, women, men, all orientations, races, opinions and identities.
I’d like to thank the writer, Rob Ward, the actors and crew and all who helped. They’ve done a marvellous thing and I’m sure this production will continue for years. Please go and see it and tell your friends Finally, I still remember every match from that season and I hereby curse Ian Woan, Graham Fenton and especially Alex Ferguson. We’ll win the Title one year and we’ll be celebrating all week.
Howay the Lads and Lasses
Love it if We Beat Them runs until 28 September at Live Theatre
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