The worlds of football and the theatre have rarely been comfortable bedfellows, something that Vinnie Jones's potential Lear is unlikely to change. However, the Oxford Theatre Touring Company have brought the first act in our Euro-drama to the stage in a new play entitled The Tractor Girls.
The play concerns the adventures of Caz and Mo, Portman Road regulars, on their trip to Moscow to watch Town's UEFA Cup tie with Torpedo at the Luzhniki. The black comedy/thriller follows the pair to the Russian capital which is still in a state of flux after the collapse of communism, a trip which apparently changes their lives forever.
TWTD spoke to David Holman, author of the Tractor Girls (and disappointingly a Fulham supporter) to find out how the play came about: "The company have been on the road for the last three years trying to put together plays which would be attractive to 16-25-year-olds, an age-group which is largely missing from theatre audiences. They're all off watching football instead probably. That's been quite successful and the plays have been about the lives of British youngsters of that age in various scenarios; sex, drugs, rock n' roll, that sort of thing.”
According to Holman the Eastern European bent of the play came from director Jeremy James: "The director had a bit of a background in Eastern Europe and he wondered if it might be time to do a play about what has happened to Eastern Europe since the Berlin Wall fell. I'm meant to be interested and knowledgeable in politics and so he asked me if I was interested, and I was.”
It was at this stage that the Town element started to come into it. After research into various facets of Eastern Europe, the young female Ipswich fans in Moscow idea looked by far the most promising, with the Moscow mafia seen as a particularly telling example of the way that the east has developed since the wall came down. Holman again: "We wondered who we could put into this Moscow world who would be interesting for the audience. Who would be not necessarily that knowledgeable about foreign travel or the way things have gone in Russia and who would have a refreshing ‘differentness' to them. The idea of young fans of a club like Ipswich on a first trip such as that was ideal. They were the sort of characters we were looking for, and the Tractor Girls were born.”
The phrase The Tractor Girls also conjured up the five-year agricultural plans and tractor building statistics of the Stalinist Second World War years, something not forgotten in the play. And, of course, Town have had their own five-year plans in recent times.
The Tractor Girls began its tour earlier this week in Salisbury and it seems ex-pat Town supporters are making a point of dragging their mates to the theatre regardless of the club they support: "You always dream of the audience which is going help you a bit on a first night and that was what we got. It turned out that an Ipswich fan living in Salisbury dragooned all of his football mates, from Norwich, Fulham, Leeds, Chelsea and others, to all come into the theatre in their kit. They all got the rather arcane references to Ray Crawford and Arnold Muhren and were laughing from the first minute to the last. We have a debt to this Ipswich boy of some depth.”
Despite a lack of Town fans in the cast David Holman did confess to staying at that well-known ITFC supporters' haunt of the Hotel Rossiya some years. They also had a bit of help from a Town supporter or two on some of the details of being a Town fan, including Official TWTD Ian Fleming Plagiarist Gavin Barber, who gave them some guidelines in the singing of songs.
The play comes to Ipswich's New Wolsey Theatre from March 26th to 30th with many other theatres visited before then (see the front page of the site for details).