Conversations are sometimes difficult these days. Your friends can tolerate what might be half-formed, challenging or controversial opinions. That can be about politics, geopolitics, or any of the many asymmetric culture wars that disfigure our society from salt on your chips to sugar in your tea.
Conversations about the weather and football can be the only exception and therefore there’s little wonder that our national game in the north becomes ever more allowable as a safe space for individual opinions to be heard and a means for playwrights use the beautiful game to access the more tender parts of our collective consciousness.
The play Love it if We Beat Them, written by Rob Ward and directed by Bex Bowsher, starts at home Newcastle’s Live Theatre on 10 – 28 September, then with away fixtures in Manchester, Hartlepool and Blackpool, who my Uncle Brian played for. The play is also heading to Hull Truck Theatre, Hull, and Shakespeare North Playhouse, Merseyside. In addition, it appears at nine rural venues in Cumbria, Durham and Hexham, supported by the wonderful Highlights Rural Touring Scheme. It doesn’t go to Sunderland though which since the title of the play is a direct quote from Kevin Keegan as he was standing up for truth and decency and fighting for the honour and glory of our team against the cynical machinations of Sir Alex Ferguson’s gamesmanship is probably quite a wise move.
Labour
That was in 1996, when sleaze was tottering the Tories and an NUFC fan called Tony Blair was getting ready for power with the power of national optimism and change. The play was written in 2019 when an entirely different political result had just booted Labour into relegation territory, sacked the manager and changed its playing philosophy. It asks how the Labour Party can pick the right manager and team, and seeks an answer to the eternal conflict between political and footballing style and substance.
Because in 1996, Keegan’s cavaliers played the beautiful game and lost and Fergie’s foulers worked the odds and won, and we’ll never forget what could have been. Did Blair’s stylish New Labour government bring any lasting change or was it just last year’s kit emblazoned with the name of the transferred centre forward who plays for someone else now?
The play shows the hard work on the training pitch of a campaigner helping people in his community for years, the mining folk clinging on, and what happens in the dressing room when a new player comes in and starts winning all the headlines, or getting that safe seat that is only safe because of the work done by the activists.
The cast
It will be a treat to see David Nellist, who is the finest of men, taught by my mam at Benfield School, who supports Newcastle with total passion and raised thousands last year for the Newcastle Foodbank by cycling the whole country. David plays Len the activist Toon fan, Jessica Johnson plays Jean his wife and Eve Tucker plays Victoria, the New Labour star midfielder who is seeking the local parliamentary nomination. It’s awkward and inspiring and human.
Daniel Watson will be joining the original cast members as Michael, a down-on-his-luck miner struggling to find work
There will be a discussion afterwards which might see me wonder why Lee Clark was replaced by David Batty or may feature the eternal challenge of governing with style and grace, dexterity and skill like a Kevin Keegan team. In politics they say that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. In Football you can play well and lose, but only teamwork, unity and endurance make you win.
I’d say politics can learn plenty from football and I’m really looking forward to seeing this play.
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