(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 3 May 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Natasha, it's more and more astonishing, the timing of this play. The stories of the week have been racism, football hooliganism, Wembley Stadium being rebuilt. Does it take advantage of that timing?

NATASHA WALTER:
Yes. But I think this play will last. Roy Williams cares deeply about social and political realities. He has gone for this with a passion.

In the last line of the play, one guy says to the other, "Don't lose yourself." That's what it's about. It's about losing a sense of moral direction by belonging to a particular tribe.

There is not just one image of racism, but you see it going through in many different patterns. That makes it sound like a political tract, which is the last thing it is. It is an energetic piece and comes at you with great force.

He has a great ear for contemporary speech. It feels very raw, juddering. It jumps out at you.

Then again, it is very artful. The speech is beautifully patterned and the whole play has this great pattern of tragic inextricability as you drive forward to the conclusion, which has this real weight of tragedy.

LAWSON:
I agree that the dialogue is astonishing throughout, but if you were going to be tough about this, it's cast almost like a current affairs debate.

Everyone is there to represent a viewpoint. You have the BNP organiser, you have the black patriot with the Union Jack on his cheeks. Is that a possible weakness with it, that everyone is there to address the point of the play?

BONNIE GREER:
Williams is a very precise playwright. He writes in a very conventional structure. That's one of the weaknesses, at this point in his writing. His structures are quite rigid. I would like to see him loosen structures and his characterisation.

But that's overwritten by his incredible ear, great compassion, his ability to hold an audience is very important, and we mustn't forget this is probably, in my opinion - at least in my opinion - one of the best casts I have ever seen on the London stage.

They are stunning. It's two hours, but the evening flips past. It's beautifully done.

LAWSON:
Some of the people playing the football thugs were so frightening you were terrified you might pass them on the way out of the theatre.

PHILIP HENSHER:
The lead thug is astonishing. He is just a star. The energy of the dialogue is just spectacular, and I think when he is writing about nothing in particular, he holds you to an incredible degree, but I thought the issues were a bit much on the nose.

I thought that he was presenting people representing a viewpoint. There is a problem with it that everybody in it is representing a white viewpoint or a black viewpoint, and they are kind of created by their race, formed by their race, in a way which almost seems to prove the point that he is trying to disprove. It's curious structure, but there is that tremendous energy to it.

GREER:
But David Hare writes that way as well. I am just saying it's not an unusual way of writing. He is trying to make a point.

It is a state of the nation play, so he has the nation on the stage. I think it's very interesting that it's upstairs in a 200-seat or 100-seat Loft. It should be downstairs in the Lyttleton.

LAWSON:
Roy Williams said in that interview, the problem about writing about racism, 1500 people will see this in the whole run and it will almost certainly transfer.

If it gets to the West end, you would want to exclude certain people because of the wrong people coming in, that's a risk, isn't it?

GREER:
That's a problem with the structure. We have a Mercutio problem here in relation to Shakespeare. Williams fell so much in love with the other characters, because of the way they spoke, that the black characters are a little bit underwritten for me.

But that's the greatness of the theatre. That may or may not happen, but still what they are going to get is a story about Britain that's extremely important.

HENSHER:
Don't you find there is a kind of general lack of back-story in this. It struck me that the only people that you hear what their jobs are are the people where the job has some kind of dramatic irony, one is a policeman, one is a soldier.

What does Laurie do? Is he married? We don't really know.

LAWSON:
We are told he did some kind of dreadful job. I thought the reason was that he was doing something dramatically, fantastically daring.

It takes place in real time against the footage of the Sky coverage of the match. I knew that that coverage ended with Barber's Adagio. The way he dovetails it is great.

WALTER:
It's unfair to say the characters are there just to represent a point of view. Because you have such difference within the white characters, you know there is a range of white points of view.

To say they are all there to represent their own racial experience is just not fair, I think, to what he is doing. I think it is much more complex than that.

LAWSON:
This is part of a venture to get new audiences into the National Theatre. Can you see it working on this evidence?

GREER:
I don't quite understand why the National want to build another structure. If the National is going to respond to the Eclipse report of the Arts Council about racism in the theatre, it should open up all those stages to plays like Williams. We should mingle in the bottom instead of going upstairs to the Loft. But I applaud this. It's a great effort.