Hamlet spends nearly three hours struggling to bring the audience onto his side, to appreciate his suffering and strife. It takes Gary Edwards the better part of thirty seconds.
Based on his book of the same name, ‘Paint It White’ is the story of a Leeds United supporter who – in more than four decades as a fan of the mighty Whites – has followed the club across the world and back again.
The show’s latest tour has come to the West Yorkshire Playhouse this week, where – judging by last night’s performance – it is guaranteed a warm Leeds welcome.
Local-born Gary Dunnington plays Edwards, all the way from his first visit to Elland Road as a youngster to his life today, fitting in his work as a painter and decorator around Kippax around his day-job as an LUFC supporter. In over four decades, he has missed only one match – and that was down to the Spanish air traffic controllers.
Striding onto the stage in his now-vintage YEP-sponsored replica Whites shirt (the kit of the 1992 title-winning side), when Dunnington’s Gary is not waxing lyrical about what it all means, or kneeling before Billy Bremner’s statue in prayer, he sits by the step-ladders and the white-painted wall that make up his workspace, watching the scenes of his life played out.
The set is sparse: one side covered in Leeds headlines, programme covers and posters in languages from every corner of the Earth, whilst at the centre of the stage is a wood-pannelled bar and a row of stools, and a black screen raised above onto which are projected images throughout the show which set the backdrop.
When we witness Edwards’s first trip to Elland Road, Old Gary plays Young Gary, shuffling around the stage on his knees with a chirpy childlike smile on his face as he’s introduced by his dad and his uncle to the working men in the Kop, the Express-reading Tories on one side of the pitch, and the enemy on the other.
Alongside Dunnington gather Jonny Dixon (best-known as Darryl Morton from Corrie), Dan O’Brien whom younger viewers (myself included) will just about remember as the teacher from My Parents Are Aliens, and Cathy Breeze (Neil’s northern woman from the new Inbetweeners movie).
The play – like the novel – is typical football story-telling: a half-whimsical, half-deadly-serious treatment of the sport as something epic akin to warfare.
However, unlike some of the other sporting books, plays and films that have emerged in recent years, ‘Paint It White’ does not tell the narrative story of Leeds United that would be familiar to readers of Clavane’s Promised Land or even viewers of The Damned United.
You watch the play’s loosely strung-together episodes and – if you didn’t already know – wonder how one moment Leeds are in the European Cup final, and the next seem to have become barely top-division non-entities. And who’s this Peter Ridsdale clown, where did he come from?
But that is not what this play is about. Not the story of Leeds United, nor of the City of Leeds, it is about being a man and a fan. We laugh at the trials of Gary and his first wife (played by Breeze with a brassy West Riding liveliness that I for one find extremely attractive, having spent too long in the South) as they spend more time fixing a date for their wedding than they actually spend married. Later on, he lives the dream and scores big by managing to find a woman who works for Tetley’s and settling down with her.
That’s what the play is all about: the life story of an ordinary (well, not that ordinary) bloke. It’s about Gary as an excited little lad; about Gary and his mates in the pub as they establish themselves as the Kippax Whites; about Gary and his life, his love, his faith.
This season’s tour has its final show in Leeds tonight, before moving on to Scarborough and taking in the rest of Yorkshire until next month. They’ll even be heading out of the North and taking the show to the provinces with a brief stop-off at Leicester Square on November 3rd. Transport for London might want to think twice about letting any of their big red buses near our Gary when he’s in town…