Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads National, London SE1
Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads is undeniably an important play, but does that necessarily make it a good one? In its earlier staging (which I missed), as the season-opener in the National's now-defunct Loft, Roy Williams's drama set during England's October 2000 World Cup qualifier, impressed critics with its unsparing look at racism and xenophobia among the British working-class. What was wanting, it was argued, was structural finesse.
Two years later, the play has reopened in a fresh pro duction in the National's Cottesloe, a venue more than three times the size of its former studio space, in an ill-advised staging from Paul Miller that sacrifices any trace of the intimacy it must have had before. The elaborate pub setting - meant, presumably to draw one into the action, with NT playgoers seated ringside, as it were - only pushes the rest of the audience away in Hayden Griffin's capacious design, and crucial scenes in a loo are all but muffled and lost. Playing a human powder keg waiting to pop, Ashley Walters, of So Solid Crew, has little danger and not much voice. He, like the play itself, doesn't sing.
· Matt Wolf is London theatre critic for Variety and the International Herald Tribune
