JOE GUY
Soho
Theatre + Writers' Centre, London W1
Opened 29 October, 2007
****
My childhood years coincided with the heyday of Georgie Best, so even
to such an unsporting type as me the trope of hotshot young footballer
led astray by success into drink, sex and general hubris is a familiar
one. But this is only one dimension of Roy Williams' play. His
protagonist Joe Boateng, a Briton of Ghanaian birth, spends the ten
years and/or 105 minutes of the play driven to assert himself not
against white hostility but against Caribbean-British contempt of
Africans, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. "I'm better than you!" is
almost his mantra, but like so many of us, he does not grasp that this
usually entails being different, not simply more efficient at being the
same. So he not only pits himself against a declining British West
Indian star on his own team, but even coaches himself to be
ostentatiously fluent in Carib-Brit street patois. Occasionally he
protests that it is an act, that there is more to him than this, but by
now he has stifled whatever that might be.
This is not "a black play" with that term's too-frequent connotations
of condescension or marginalisation. Williams is one of the finest
British playwrights to have emerged within the past decade or so, and
quite often uses football as a prism through which to view wider and
deeper matters. (A kind of prequel for a younger audience dealing with
white/black racism in the 1980s, There's
Only One Wayne Matthews!, has just ended its run at the Polka
Theatre.) Both this play and Femi Elufowoju Jr's production excellently
bear out the Tiata Fahodzi company's mission statement about producing
work "sourced from people living within British African communities"
and "aimed at an all-inclusive British audience." As Abdul Salis' Joe
transforms from a timid African teenager into a footballing rude boy,
he is matched by Syan Blake's journey as his sometime girlfriend Naomi,
from lippy schoolgirl to suffering appendage to hard-gained strength
and wisdom; the pair's hopeful ending, though, strikes me as rather
contrived in dramatic terms. The rest of the eight-strong cast mostly
take multiple roles, with highlights being Heather Craney as the agent
who dares to stand up to Joe and Michael Brogan's double as a
high-volume team manager and a police sergeant who is also a betrayed
fan.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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