Skip to main content

Energetic and Fascinating Revival

Oi for England
Not Too Tame Theatre Company with RWCMD, Venue 13, Edinburgh Fringe
August 19 - 29, 2010

“Right, f--- it!” Trevor Griffiths' opening line sets the tone for his punchy 1982 one-act play. Skinhead band “Ammunition” has been offered an election night gig for the fine sum of £30. For the four of them, “doleboys “ all, the sum is a fortune. The drama picks at the splits between the band members over what is intended to be a massive Nazi event.

Outside on the Manchester streets gangs of Asians are out for blood in response to an assault on one of their own. As it unwinds Trevor Griffiths’ structure is a writing master class in compression and texture, rounded off with a brilliant and unexpected twist.

“We're for our own kind” may be the motif but the politics of identity are always fissiparous. Just like this month’s falling out within the BNP the band is split by the fact of one of them, Finn, being a mick. Left on his own his relationship with landlord’s daughter Gloria (Jess Hayles) is warm. As shaven-headed and monkey-booted as the others, he has access to a deeper narrative, both musical and historical. He sings to himself the lilting “Raglan Road” (“let grief be a fallen leaf/ at the dawning of the day.”)

Like Eddie Waters, the stand-up veteran in “Comedians”, Finn's grandfather has been present at a concentration camp liberation. Finn knows that Nazi lies are just that. When Griffiths’ climax comes it is cunningly all the more surprising and milked for all its energy by Stephen Bisland.

Anthony Wright Wilson’s character is known only as the Man. Almost lugubrious in his attitude to the band at first he mutates into a maelstrom of menace. His searing speech of loathing of “chocolate England” is without equal.

The text has an occasional reference which is now most likely lost. “Anderton's puffballs” probably does not mean a lot now. (On a personal note I had an encounter once with a couple of them and did not care for it much.) But the play fascinates in depicting just how much has changed in a generation.

The band’s anthem is “Sod the law and pass the ammunition”, or maybe “sod the Lord”. Jack Brown’s Swells drives it on drums and Lewis Reeves' Napper gives it great gritty vocals.

Oi for England is not to going to play a major venue again. Scan the impossibly vast list of Fringe productions and political theatre seems thin to invisible; all credit to Jimmy Fairhurst, assistant director Hannah Jarman, and the company for getting it out and up from Cardiff to Edinburgh.

Reviewed by: Adam Somerset in Theatre in Wales, 19th August, 2010.

This show runs until 29th August 2010, at Venue 13 in Edinburgh. For more details and to book tickets visit The Edinburgh Festival Guide.


The script of Oi for England appears in Theatre Plays Two published by Spokesman Books

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain

Tate Liverpool: Exhibition 28 February – 11 May 2014 Adult £8.80 (without donation £8) Concession £6.60 (without donation £6) Help Tate by including the voluntary donation to enable Gift Aid Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain , is a new take on how the changes in the meaning of words reflect the cultural shifts in our society. This dynamic exhibition takes its name and focus from the seminal 1976 Raymond Williams book on the vocabulary of culture and society. An academic and critic influenced by the New Left, Williams defined ‘Keywords’ as terms that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. His book contains more than 130 short essays on words such as ‘violence’, ‘country’, ‘criticism’, ‘media’, ‘popular’ and ‘exploitation’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams expressed the wish some other ‘form of presentation could be devised’ for his book, and this exhibition i...
58 comments
Read more

'Not as dumb as he looks' - Muhammad Ali on Bertrand Russell

In his autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story , Muhammad Ali recounts how Bertrand Russell got in contact with him, and their ensuing correspondence: *** For days I was talking to people from a whole new world. People who were not even interested in sports, especially prizefighting. One in particular I will never forget: a remarkable man, seventy years older than me but with a fresh outlook which seemed fairer than that of any white man I had ever met in America. My brother Rahaman had handed me the phone, saying, ‘Operator says a Mr. Bertrand Russell is calling Mr. Muhammad Ali.’ I took it and heard the crisp accent of an Englishman: ‘Is this Muhammad Ali?’ When I said it was, he asked if I had been quoted correctly. I acknowledged that I had been, but wondered out loud, ‘Why does everyone want to know what I think about Viet Nam? I’m no politician, no leader. I’m just an athlete.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is a war more barbaric than others, and because a mystique is built up ...
25 comments
Read more

James Kirkup

James Kirkup has died, aged 91. In 2004 he sent us a copy of No More Hiroshimas . He had originally collected together this volume of hia A-bomb poems in 1983, but it took twenty years before we published it 'as a real book'. James recounts 'My A-Bomb Biography' in his preface. Here are the opening lines of the title poem, No Mor e Hiroshimas . At the station exit, my bundle in hand, Early the winter afternoon's wet snow Falls thinly round me, out of a crudded sun. I had forgotten to remember where I was. Looking about, I see it might be anywhere - A station, a town like any other in Japan, Ramshackle, muddy, noisy, drab; a cheerfully Shallow impermanence: peeling concrete, litter, 'Atomic Lotion, for hair fall-out', a flimsy department store; Racks and towers of neon, flashy over tiled and tilted waves Of little roofs, shacks cascading lemons and persimmons, Oranges and dark-red apples, shanties awash with rainbows Of squid and octopus, shellfish, slabs o...
Post a Comment
Read more