Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Ar*e For England – Garrick Theatre, London.

Writer: Alex Hill

Director: Sean Turner

Billy really, really likes football. It has been his single greatest passion since he was very small, playing kickabout with his best mate Adam, signing on to a tribal attachment to AFC Wimbledon, developing rituals for match days that include a Full English breakfast at a café with a beautiful, unapproachable waitress, and falling in with a stratum of fiercer, wilder fandom when the pair join Fruitgum and his minions and join them on a journey to football’s dark side.

This is a journey that reaches its apotheosis on Wembley Way, July 11th 2021, when Gareth Southgate’s England team meet Italy in the final of the 2020 UEFA Euro cup, delayed from 2020 because of Covid. Thousands of ticketless England fans storm the turnstiles to get into the stadium, and Billy stakes his claim for fame by lighting a flare that he has clamped between his buttocks. Because it’s funny.

Alex Hill is a non-stop energy source,  bouncing onto the stage, demonstrating the joy and wonder of being off your bonce on beer and adrenaline and any other stimulant you can find, being mad with your mates, living with the vicarious joy and despair of football fandom, and slowly getting involved in darker, more violent expressions of tribal passion.

For an exploration of mindless indulgence, it is a thoughtful, sensitive piece, setting Billy’s relationships with the waitress and with Adam against the fan culture. The dramatic flaw of the piece is that the fan madness is more fun to watch and easier to respond to than the quite delicate tracing of love and loss in Billy’s life apart from football. There is a sentimentality in Alex Hill’s writing, and a reduction in his foot-to-the-floor performance, when he gets off the topic of madness with mates, despite that being the crux of the play; The point where Billy realises that self-inflicted second-degree buttock burns may not be all a person can aspire to.

That caveat aside, it’s a fully committed, highly entertaining hour of theatre, with a point of view that is more than simple laddishness. Alex Hill is a performer to cherish, well served by simple, effective direction and a surprisingly nuanced script, and getting excellent value out of the loan of the Garrick Theatre for a Sunday evening. The ad-libbed audience participation is fast and funny, and creates a bond between audience and actor from the first flare-filled scene to the heartbreaking finale.

Reviewed on 22 June 2025