Danny knows what he likes, and what he likes is football.
He’s 19 years-old with a dead-end job in a workhouse. He’s stuck in a terraced house with his reactionary and critical Dad; Mum left some time ago. What Danny lives for are Saturdays and his friends. He doesn’t seem to be too bothered about the actual game; it’s the violent camaraderie he loves
‘That feeling of knowing who you are and where you belong.’
In Ben Tagoe’s exhilarating one man play Better Days, George Martin bursts onto the stage as Danny, a lad brimming with adrenaline and swagger. Behind him we see footage of football hooligans; fans invading the pitch, bottles flying, police horses charging. Danny likes labels; Lacoste, Burberry, Sergio Tacchini, but what thrills him to the core is
‘that cocktail of petrol fumes and lager. This is life. Alive and proud.’
Yet even as the show begins, we sense that there’s more to Danny. Yes he throws himself into the fights, but what he really values is a sense of belonging, a tribe. He feels at one with
‘Young men from council houses with big hearts and heavy hands.’
He worries about getting into trouble, and realises ‘some of the happiest people I know are actually thick as f**k’ but it doesn’t matter. He belongs.
And then Danny encounters a different tribe.
Danny’s best friend is the popular, successful Miggy, and Miggy has discovered something else. He’s found Acid House and Rave.
Better Days has a wonderful soundtrack of 1990s club music. In other venues it’s been performed to a standing audience; here in La Belle Angele on a wet Sunday afternoon we are seated, which perhaps dilutes the excitement a little, but Martin’s delivery is so strong, compelling and poetic that we are still quickly transported back to that era of rebellion and joy. The audience loves it, and there were points when I really would have liked just to get up and dance.
At first Danny’s resistant. He watches Top of the Pops with his Dad (‘me dad’s f***ing disgusted!’) and likes Happy Mondays and Nomad’s (I Wanna Give You) Devotion, but he’s determined not to follow Miggy’s lead. Danny is staunchly anti-drugs and he wants to stay that way. Even when he caves, he’s only going to a club to please Miggy. There’ll be no drugs. Definitely.
Before long, Danny is absorbed into alternative culture and loving every minute of it. He describes the effects of E-s in colourful detail. They make everyone beautiful. They make the music he thought he hated (Frankie Knuckles, N-Joi, A Guy Called Gerald, Sunscreem, Stone Roses, Andy Weatherall) beautiful
‘it’s pulling me up till I’m floating on a chemical sea.’
He loves all these people with their happy faces. He even loves their whistles.
Danny, Miggie and Caroline, a seasoned drug user with whom Danny’s hooked up after sharing a few trips, become inseparable. Their routine consists of weekend raves and weekday come downs
‘Mondays…when all the rubbish in the world is piled on top of you in a sea of sugarless treacle.’
A bit similar to football really, except football’s drug of choice is usually alcohol, and in Danny’s new world there’s no violence, nothing bad happens. Until it does.
Danny’s relationship with his Dad is particularly well observed, as Danny comes to realise that, like everyone else, he’s just
‘smothered by expectations and boundaries…..his generation never had drugs that make you say how you feel. In this town men can’t air their feelings.’
Better Days could easily have turned into a straightforward ‘drugs and violence: bad’ diatribe, but Tagoe’s sensitive, imaginative writing and Martin’s electrifying acting are far more nuanced than that. Martin’s body language is superb; in a few simple gestures he can convey a mood, a feeling, the ups, the downs. Tagoe creates a story that neither judges nor preaches, rather it examines the many ways in which we get through life and the things we do to find a sense of purpose and community.
And I think Tagoe’s conclusion is that almost everything has a good and bad side, but it’s up to us to choose what we take away from what’s on offer. We can make it work.
Better Days is at Just the Tonic at La Belle Angele, Hastie’s Close, at 1.30pm every day until 26 August.
