Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse For England
Inis Nua
Fergie's Pub
1214 Sansom St.
Philadelphia
Oct. 24, 2025
We’re sitting in a pub when a young man clad in English football merch stands up and starts shouting at the crowd. He begins chanting, clapping, and making crass jokes at the audience. He gets up on stage and drops his pants and yells, “this flare is going up my bum cause it’s fun!”
Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse For England is a show by playwright Alex Hill produced by Inis Nua theater company, starring Adam Howard. Put on inside of Fergie’s Pub as a part of their “Pop-Up Play in a Pub” Series, the bar chatter floating up the stairs set the stage for an evening of pub banter and football chat.
After that greeting by the drunk and coked out Billy who had just gone viral for sticking a flare up his arse, the play back peddles to give us a chance to get to know him, and to understand where his love of the game comes from. We meet his dear friend Adam, and Billy tells us about their childhood spent playing football together in the park. Over the course of the play we see them grow up together, and witness the fall out when they get involved with a tough crowd.
In the show, sport is a slippery slope. What begins as an avenue for connection, and a place to bond with your school mates becomes a den of escalating violence. The price you have to pay to stay in the inner circles only gets higher, and the drugs get harder. By letting us into the inner workings of his mind, Billy’s story becomes an in-depth investigation of the internal worlds of men, and their desire to fit in, and their willingness to change.
Billy, unlike the play about his life, is unable to reflect with self-awareness; when asked repeatedly why he did what he did (you know, sticking a flare up his butt), he doesn't have a serious answer. In his adult life, football is what he looks forward to. We watch him wade through the work week awaiting the thrill of game night. At first, I found his love of the chants and shared purpose charming, but as he began to put the game over his closest relationships, that obsession turned sour.
In the end, Adam and Billy drift apart when Adam stops wanting to join Billy on his raucous and violent nights out. During this rift in their friendship, Adam struggles privately. When we cut to Billy in a suit jacket at a funeral, we learn Adam has taken his own life. When giving a speech at the funeral, Billy is finally able to put into words his answer to the show's big question: “The last thing that you asked me was why. Why would you stick a flare up your ass. And I didn’t know how to answer then, but I think I do now. To belong, to feel respected, and to feel powerful.”
Some... uh... snapshots from the show...
I heard someone say from a table near me, “It really sneaks up on you,” while wiping tears from their eyes. I agreed, this sudden death felt out of place. I resented its abrupt and overly tidy conclusion. The intensity of the suicide and funeral speech was unexpected, and I found that it flattened the complexity of the story. The emotional arc of the show was cut short due to near inexplicable tragedy.
Regardless of my feelings about the resonance of this ending, Howard almost had me sold on the writing’s direction with his earnest performance. Howard integrated a shy demeanor with an always bouncing leg and the wide spread physicality of the average dude. Despite the weight of the ending, Howard played it with delicacy, tucking his true feelings beneath a chuckle or a tender smile.
Reflecting after the funeral Billy says, “This isn’t about me and it shouldn’t be.” But it is! It’s a one man show, and I wanted to see him change without the overwhelming intervention of his friend’s suicide. We are meant to sympathize with these men, to understand more fully their inner worlds. The extreme ending revoked the capacity for nuanced exploration of this, and halted the show's driving force of personal investigation.
Why did you stick a flare up your arse? Why did your friend have to die before you noticed he was struggling? Are violent sports irredeemable enterprises? I’m not sure I got any satisfying answers. We spent the night getting to know Billy, and I was enchanted by his love of the game; the audience witnessed how sport connected him initially to his friend, and detailed why he loved to go and be in the crowd. The show leaves the question of sport open ended; following his friend's passing, Billy and his dad choose not to see the game on a Friday. It's a first for them. Instead they go to the theatre.
This is the last weekend to catch Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse for England. Buy tickets here.
