This commentary contains some spoilers and may be better read after the screenings.
One of the pleasures Playing Away offers a viewer today is its fascinating glimpse of Brixton in the 1980s. The compelling accuracy of this depiction is unsurprising given that director Horace Ové, knighted in 2022 for services to media, lived in Brixton after he moved to London from Trinidad and Tobago.
Ové was the first Black director to make a feature film in Britain. Pressure (1976) is a piece of experimental cinema which still packs a sizable political punch in its depiction of life for the children of the Windrush generation in a Britain deformed by inequality and injustice. Ten years after Pressure dazzled critics and audiences, Channel 4 commissioned and screened Playing Away. More comic and less controversial, it gives the impressions of being a gentler, less daring piece of work than its predecessor.
Nevertheless, this story of a Brixton cricket team – the Conquistadors – travelling to rural Suffolk for a match does not shy away from making political comment. It shows – albeit in comic mode – the kinds of racial and class stereotypes which were – and are – still alive and playing cricket in rural England. The night before the Brixton team arrives, one of the residents of the picturesque village of Sneddington suggests that their guests are ‘liable to burn a few buildings.’ Later, when team tensions mean that the Conquistadors are two players short, the same village resident jokes that ‘they got hungry and ate one of them last night.’ In the course of the film, the racism, homophobia, misogyny, and class snobbery which lurk behind the veneer of English politeness and fair play are exposed in all their ugliness.
But Ové is too subtle and too compassionate a director to suggest simple, crude divisions. As the man makes his crass and offensive comment about cannibalism, many of the villagers around him look appalled. Robbo (Joseph Marcell), one of the Conquistadors, points out to his teammates that ‘these people have difficulties of their own’, in a generous recognition of the tensions around class, gender, and sexuality which blight Sneddington’s phony rural idyll. The characters – created by the legendary and multiple award-winning writer Caryl Phillips and given life by an outstanding cast – are never superficial ciphers but fully realised and complex mixtures of vulnerability and prejudice.
This complex exploration of social issues perfectly demonstrates the magnificent achievement of Channel 4 in the years following its conception in 1982. With a remit to fill a gap in existing programming by representing the voices of under-represented groups, the channel offered a shot in the arm to British television culture, flooding its schedules with programmes for, by, and about people who had too often struggled to see themselves on the BBC or ITV. Playing Away, despite its comedy, is a crucial reminder of the young channel’s social role. One of the film’s lead actors, Norman Beaton, would shortly after head the cast of Desmond’s, Channel 4’s most successful sitcom.
Playing Away climaxes with the cricket match in a sequence which showcases Ové’s magnificent direction. With intense close-ups, slow motion, and low-angle shots, the match becomes monumental; more than a mere sporting contest, it is an elegant statement of defiance, both conflict and camaraderie, full of laughter and drama. Before the match begins, Conquistador captain Willie-Boy (Beaton) gives a pep talk to his team. Avoiding all the sentimental clichés which usually define such moments in sports films, Willie-Boy’s speech – terse, unspectacular – sums up what is at stake in this brilliant film’s ruthless examination of the divisions which lie just beneath the grim surface of insincere good manners:
All right, listen. I don’t have no big speech or team talk to give now or nothing. Everybody have their own idea what we doing here and if we should be here and the rest. But now that we here we might as well play, and I mean play. I don’t have no time to fool around with these people. A cricket ground ain’t no place to separate the good from the bad. It’s us and them. No gentleman shit out there. We play, we win and we gone. But mostly we win. Ready?
In 2025, when such divisions still grip our society, we must be ready to revisit films like Playing Away.
1986
Directed by Horace Ové
Written by Caryl Phillips
Norman Beaton (Willie-Boy)
Brian Bovell (Stuart)
Gary Beadle (Errol)
Suzette Llewellyn (Yvette)
Trevor Thomas (Jeff)
Robert Urquhart (Godfrey)
Helen Lindsay (Marjorie)
Nicholas Farrell (Derek)