Edinburgh Fringe 2024
The Ghost of White Hart Lane
Bruised Sky Productions
Genre: Biographical Drama, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Solo Play
Venue: Underbelly at Bristo Square
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
This is words that dance off a page and from the pen of a brilliantly crafted piece of theatre, given grace by deft direction. The stage is set and equal to the task of commemorating a man of promise subject to a tragedy that nobody could foresee.
Review
John White was a promising young footballer, big enough, strong enough and good enough. The problem as we discover was that some people felt he was not. It meant that instead of taking the applause at Ibrox for Glasgow Rangers he took an entirely different pathway until he ended up in both a Scotland shirt and one of Tottenham Hotspur. An FA Cup winner, former Alloa Athletic and Falkirk FC player, White was killed in a freak accident on a golf course in his mid-twenties: having finished training he was off for a game of golf alone, and when it began to rain heavily, he took refuge under a tree and when the lightning hit it, White was lost to us. He left a widow and two young children.
One of those children, the son takes on a role here as a narrator whilst the ghost of his dad takes us from his beginnings in Musselburgh to the heights of being the ghost on the wing of a pretty special Spurs side. Our narrator dons each role with ease and panache. Just as White managed to dazzle on the sides of the pitch, our solo guide is able to dazzle onstage jus as well. It’s a tough task and very much helped by the authenticity which comes from a carefully crafted script by Martin Murphy which is based upon the book of the same name, by Rob White and Julie Welch.
I have to admit I was initially drawn in by the title and the subject matter but what a treat! Plays about sport can be difficult to pull off and here we have newsreel and visuals on a screen behind, with a simple set of a suitcase from the attic in which John White’s life has been mothballed. His son, Rob, blows off the cobwebs and off we go.
The narrative weaves between the upbringings of son and father which allows for one living in the shadow of a man he cannot remember to be compared to the poverty of the other. Both share the fact that they lost their fathers early, which means we get contrast and uniqueness in equal measure. This really had me hooked. And of course the footage from 1996 and reflections of the son of a Scot, living in the capital of the Euros with THAT goal from Gazza and THAT penalty miss was a pain shared across the footlights.
The pace brought to it meant that we could feel the poignancy of critical times in both the lives of Rob and John when we had intense moments of reflection. We shared the immense joy of John finally getting signed and the realisation when Rob was watching FA Cup footage, that up on the tele was dad. Moving. Son had never seen dad move before. And what a mover he was.
The significance 60 years on of the loss of a man who was the equal of so many greats in the game, who kept his place in a Spurs team that had Jimmy Greaves up front, Billy Bingham pulling the strings and the future ahead of them as they got to Europe and got to beat the team, that passed him up after 40 viewings – Glasgow Rangers is beautifully given homage here. Not for the first, nor the last time, one of the two top Scottish teams were beaten by their own prejudice. But here Rangers were done over by John White – what a fitting epitaph, as this is to John White.
