H, Daz and Ray are Englishmen abroad and they make pretty shabby ambassadors for their country. Scouser Ray and Mancunian H follow the England football team to overseas matches, exploiting the crime and chaos that break out wherever the over-excited fans go.

When H encounters young Daz, a cockney ex-Marine, in custody at a Scandinavian police station, they strike up an uneasy friendship. Is H's bragging and camaraderie what it seems or does he plan to make Daz a pawn in a more dangerous game?

Gregory Burke's new play, in a co-production presented by the Royal Court and the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse directed by Matt Wilde, has the tense grittiness of a television thriller, but also has more serious aspirations. In its opening scene, Daz admires H's stash of counterfeit money and H points out images of Darwin and Elgar's figures, as he puts it, vitally important to the national sense of self, on the banknotes. H invokes Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest in support of his own viciously mercantile worldview.

For those young men, it's cash that counts, not culture. Yet they cannot escape their identity. H and Ray are defined not just by their Englishness, but by the cities of their birth. And in the play's best line H, along with Daz's meat-headed avowal of a passion for a punch-up, sums up the way in which an image of English has changed from one of courage to criminality: "There is a corner of a foreign jail that is forever England."

Burke does not entirely succeed in integrating these ideas into the drama. The debates often feel contrived, and he sometimes sacrifices action to speechifying. But if the writing sometimes feels slack, at its tautest it's edge-of-your-seat stuff.

Lisa Lillywhite's set transforms effortlessly from holding cell to the smart hotel room where the final showdown between the three men takes place complete with a gasp-inducing twist that recalls Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter. Wilde's production is compellingly acted by Paul Anderson, Jeff Hordley as H and Andrew Schofield as Ray, and towards its climax it is gripping - a riveting, nasty glimpse of England's underbelly.

Sam Marlowe

The Times - 13th October 2005