THEATRE
Muddied oafs
HILARY SPURLING
Peter Terson's Zigger Zagger, which last week celebrated the opening of the football season, is a powerful and, so they say, a faithful portrait of the strange delights of football: grey skies and scarlet favours, crumpled shorts and crimson thighs, the scrunch of fag packets, screech of rattles and the tempestuous swell of the crowd, breathing in spasms, sobbing and panting, or parting to receive a blue policeman and closing with a howl over his head. Moist, plunging banks of fans with rosy cheeks and mufflers fill the back of the stage. At their feet a lonely hooligan, prised from the mob for throwing a bottle, sits weeping in a cell under the stands. Michael Croft's production has the charm, un- couth but not ungraceful and peculiarly northern, of orgies in old Dutch paintings, hockey-players in the beeryard or hefty swaddled peasants entwining solemnly on the ice at Christmas.
Also their flushed and leering wildness, when the crowd joins in bacchic hymn to one Vincent, centre forward : young virgins dream at night in stuffy bedrooms beneath life-size cut-outs of Vincent. Vincent himself, as mimed by Robert Eaton, is a fearsome Northern demi-god, loping round the ring to show himself to the fans with gangling, stately trot, almost a waddle, and coyly flapping wrists; or hitching himself off the ground to shoot, with the mindless vegetable grin, like Picasso's footballer in the Tate last month, of a great performer whose strength has all run into his waggling limbs.
Against this gaudy frieze, Mr Terson has set a series of encounters—played with almost equal relish by his enormous cast—with those sour, bedraggled individuals, headmaster, magistrate, vicar, youth leader and so forth, who make it their business to lead youth. Our bottle-throw- ing hero is passed from hand to hand, from bleary pep talk to the needling routines of adult sarcasm, from school hall—a hymn tailing off with sinister droop and whine, like a gramo- phone gone slow, and returning with the steady pulsing beat of the fan-club anthem—to peeling youth club, and cramped suburban home. If the construction here is somewhat ramshackle, Mr Terson has a cheerful, uncensorious eye for the cheap, synthetic or dishonest—for the futility of cheap and dingy adult blandishments when set against the pagan glories of Roker Park and Bramhall Lane. But our hero—
mocked, rejected, jilted, turned down by the army, bound over by the magi- strate, despised even by the school dentist, and yet so transparently honest and winsome and biddable—has also a strong family likeness to Larry the Lamb. Hence the somewhat sour conclusion in which, confronted by his Good and Evil Angels—on the one hand, by his brother-in-law, the plumber, offering a comfort- less vision of genteel self-repression; on the other by Zigger Zagger, golden king of the fan-club, played with infinitely seductive grace by Anthony May—confronted by these two, our hero wipes away a tear and turns his face for ever from the football ground. The effect is much as if the doctor had said yes, when urged `0 Faustus, lay that damned book aside' in favour of reading the Scriptures.
Conclusions are perhaps not Mr Terson's strong point; his only other play seen so far in London—The Mighty Reservoy—had a simi- larly disingenuous ending; together with the same pleasantly dispassionate humour, and the same streak of formidable theatrical cunning. This production confirms, what Little Malcolm suggested last year, not simply the Nvr's impec- cable taste in modern playwrights, also that the company is rather more at home in trousers on the stage than as a rule in tights and garters.
Previous page
