It's been a vintage year for Alan Plater. He has produced a sharp satire on the aesthetic rebranding of Gateshead, Charlie's Trousers, at Live Theatre in Newcastle, and he scored a hit with his big-band nostalgia trip, Blonde Bombshells of 1943, at West Yorkshire Playhouse. Now he turns out a slight but amiable memoir of the football team he has followed through thin and thin.
Of all the sleeping giants of the English game, Hull City has repeatedly proved to be the most comatose. Yet the eternal terrace optimists, Plater among them, will tell you that things may just have turned a corner. When he was working on Confessions, Plater even had to stretch his deadline beyond the close of last season to determine whether he would be writing a tragedy or a comedy. Thankfully, City went up.
So, in celebration of the club's centenary year, Plater treats us to a relentless barrage of black-and-amber arcana. Did you know that Hull City is the only team ever to have on its books two Welsh-speaking goalkeepers? And the only player to have been booked for facing the crowd and orchestrating his own barracking?
It's all good, anorak-ish fun, though Plater has difficulty stuffing the trivia into an adequate format. There's an attempt to enfold four generations of bad refereeing decisions into some form of narrative, with little vignettes of a family handing down a sacred cloth cap each time a new City supporter is born to suffer. But the majority of the show is an awkward amalgam of stand-up, slide presentation and interactive supporters' helpline; its forced humour betrays its hurried conception.
Whereas more fully realised footballing dramas such as An Evening With Gary Lineker or Fever Pitch are principally studies of male obsession, Confessions of a City Supporter remains resolutely a play about Hull City. It goes down a storm in front of a home crowd prepared to whoop at every reference, but I doubt it would pick up many points away.
· Until October 9. Box office: 01482 323638.
