ON STAGE. ONE NIGHT IN ISTANBUL:The play One Night in Istanbul is heading to Dublin's Grand Canal Theatre in June. MARY HANNIGANtalks to its colourful writer, Nicky Allt, who turned from football addiction to writing
'ISN'T IT funny how life works," says Nicky Allt, laughing as he pays homage to the two men he credits for, unwittingly, putting him on the road he's now travelling. Only for a judge in Birmingham and a Turkish football steward he wouldn't, he says, be talking about the opening in June of his play, One Night in Istanbul, at Dublin's Grand Canal Theatre.
He’s a touch shamefaced when he admits that he tried to leave the Ataturk Olympic Stadium at half-time during the 2005 Champions League final, deciding that he could take no more of Liverpool’s humiliation by AC Milan and figuring the sensible thing to do was to make it back in to Istanbul before the bulk of the crowd left at full-time.
“Three-nil down at half-time, a lot of us tried to get back to the city,” is his defence, “but a Turkish steward man-handled me back into the ground. Wouldn’t let me leave. I had no choice but to stay. I’m forever grateful to him,” he laughs.
He wasn’t then, as many were, en route to the city centre when Liverpool were scoring three times in six second-half minutes, and he was still in the stand when they won the final on penalties. He was, then, a witness to what he says was the greatest night in the history of the club he has supported since he was a boy.
But he shouldn’t even have been there. The season before he’d picked up a three-year ban from football after he was arrested following a beer-fuelled pitch “invasion” in Birmingham. “We decided we’d run on at the final whistle, just for an end-of-season party. So I did, dived on Steven Gerrard, he was having a good laugh at me. But the others stayed in the stand, no one ran on with me.”
He was arrested and appeared in court a few days later. He expected nothing more than a fine, but “the judge told me because there had been trouble in Birmingham with pitch invasions they’d clamped down.”
His punishment, then, was a three-year ban from attending any football games. For a fella who’d been following Liverpool up and down England and all over the world since he was 13 it felt like a life sentence. “I even followed them to Swaziland and Tokyo,” he laughs. “So, the ban was really hard at first, it was stepping away from a whole lifestyle, it was like ‘what do I do?’ Well, I thought, what do I love? Writing.”
After a painful spell of cold turkey, there ended Allt’s “addiction” to football. “And that’s what it was, football just dominated my life and took up so much of my time. The ban was the best thing that happened me because it allowed me concentrate on writing – and it’s no coincidence that I’ve had these big hits since.”
Istanbul? “Well, yeah, I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I would not be kept away from that game.”
Now 48, Allt’s passion for writing was fired by “Mr McDonald”, his Irish-born English teacher at St Kevin’s school in Kirkby, northeast of Liverpool, where his family moved from the city centre when he was a child. McDonald encouraged him to go to university to develop his talent, but that wasn’t an option for Allt.
“My Mum wanted me to, but my Dad just wanted me to get an apprenticeship, he was that generation. So I told my teacher that it just wasn’t on. Over the next 20 years or so I emigrated, lived in South Africa, Germany, Florida, had 25, 30 different jobs, working on building sites, market stalls, scaffolding, I’ve been a roofer, everything. And I hated everyone of them. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis but when I was 38 I decided I’d had enough, I wanted to write.
“I saved up money, went to uni, did script-writing, just decided to go for it. I locked myself away, wrote a book and a play. And I just knew this was exactly what I wanted to do. I’m like a bloody demon, people can’t get me away from my laptop, for eight, nine years I’ve been doing about six hours a day. My mates, builders and that, don’t think it’s a proper job at all. They just think I’m sitting about at home.”
The words, he says, flowed, “I had all these stories and ideas in my head for years and now I was finally getting the chance to put them down.”
Boys From The Mersey told the story of his travels across Europe following Liverpool with his 'crew', the book selling 100,000 copies to date. Brick Up The Mersey Tunnels, a play he wrote with his friend Dave Kirby, drew audiences of 120,000 over four runs. Allt was getting the hang of this writing lark.
Nothing gives him more pride, though, than the success of One Night in Istanbul because, he says, so many of the 26,000 who saw it in its first run at the Liverpool Empire last year had never been inside a theatre before. “The whole idea for me was to bring theatre back to the people – and it was the people, I think, who won this trophy in 2005. When we were 3-0 down and they sang You’ll Never Walk Alone the manager opened the windows of the dressing room at half-time and said to the players, ‘listen to the supporters’. That’s why I always thought the people won the game.”
But even finding a theatre to agree to put on the play proved difficult. “One of them said they didn’t know if there was an audience for it. It’s that theatre thing, it’s quite snobby, they were looking down their noses at us. These places didn’t want hairy-arsed football supporters coming in.”
His solution was to set up his own production company with two partners. “We did it with a kind of punk attitude, ended up doing everything ourselves,” he says. “Out of a cast of eight or nine five of them were new actors. A lot of established theatre people were telling us we’d come unstuck. We didn’t. By the fourth, fifth night we were sold out, you couldn’t get a ticket for love nor money.”
Rafa Benitez, Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher and Sammy Lee attended the opening night, coming on stage at the end. “The roof nearly came off,” laughs Allt, “I think that helped sell the play – people were expecting them to be there every night!”
Allt drew on his own reservoir of stories following Liverpool around Europe for the play, which tells the largely comical story of two fathers and their sons travelling to Istanbul for the final. Hitler’s cufflinks make an appearance too – it’s a long story. “It was always going to be difficult to capture that night and put it on stage. What we did was use a lot of media, there’s audio of Rafa, Gerrard and Carragher recreating the half-time team talk and the penalties come up on screen. So we ended up with an atmosphere like the game, people singing and screaming. People have said to me that they’d never been to the theatre but after this they will come again – that’s the best thing I could hear, the very best.
“The obvious place to take it next was Dublin, so that’s why we’re coming here – and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am about that. Maybe Belfast and Glasgow too, we’ll see.” After that? The movie. “The budget is about £2 million, they’re going in to pre-production now, they’ll start filming around June. It’s mad,” he laughs. Hats off, then, to the Birmingham judge and the Turkish football steward. It’s true, it’s funny how life works.
One Night in Istanbul runs from June 2nd to June 5th at the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin; grandcanaltheatre.ie
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