John Greally

-419/ World of the Football Fan THE NATIONAL YOUTH THEATRE have come to the West End with the first of this year's five plays, which make up a more ambitious season than any other in their 11 years' existence. Specially commissioned for this 1967 opening production, Zigger Zagger is playing for four weeks at the Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre with a vigorous young cast of 90, no less.
The author with a growing reputation, Peter Terson, has given them a massive pageant of the football-fan world, through which young Harry Philton wanders, living only for the herd life of the supporters' terrace but forced to keep struggling for a place in the rat race outside the stadium. All the available jobs are deadend.
Like the back of Harry's mind, the back of the stage is perpetually filled with a terrace of soccer fans, who chant and rant at the ups and downs of his private life in the foreground as if he were their home centre forward
The play's technique is a fascinating experiment—a mixture of Greek drama and medieval morality, sprinkled with song and dance routines. (The song aspect is obstinately off key.)
Though he's an uncommon thick-head to start with, Harry is shown as the victim of a rotten schooling. Ns boyhating English master and pulpit-thumping school head should put all secondary mods out of business tomorrow.
As it turns out, however, his education seems to have been fair enough preparation for adult life. Harry, with the sociological insight and assurance of a pop singer, finds society wanting at every level.
As the puffing and blowing teenager, with many varieties of the fixed snarl or simper of boredom, Nigel Humphries carries the action very competently through classroom, squalid home life, employment exchange and, of course, football ground.
The director, Michael Croft, has handled the chorus background masterfully. It's a bit overpowering in a moderate
sized, playhouse. but the twists and turns he produces with the voice of the herd are compelling.
It is a pity that more attention was not given to the solo work. Although Tcrson's dialogue often stumbles into lame rhetoric, the general flow of it is realistic and racy. Yet most of the 40-odd speaking actors have been allowed to throw away their lines by the dozen. A lively exception is Anthony May, playing Zigger Zagger, the embodiment of all the idle young soccer fans going.
Very much in the fashion, the play makes teenagers essentially nit-witted, censorious, and right about everything. Whether they were aware of this or not, the cast as a whole and the young audience entered into the spirit of the thing with charming gusto.
Two other N.Y.T. companies are coming to London to stage The Tempest and Henry W Part 1, which 15,000 schoolchildren have already put their names down to attend. Nobody can say that the British theatre is showing signs of dying from lack of acting or audience potential.