In 2009, rugby star Gareth “Alfie” Thomas had the world at his feet. An unparalleled international career and many thousands of adoring fans. But there was a secret, one he tried to keep even from himself: Thomas was gay. His marriage was in tatters; the red-tops were threatening to out him any day. Something had to go. Thomas feared it might be his life.
A collaboration with National Theatre Wales, Cardiff’s Sherman, London’s Arcola and the touring troupe Out of Joint, Robin Soans’s new verbatim play follows the remarkable career of the first professional rugby player to come out as gay while still playing the game. Retelling Thomas’s journey from gangly, hulking teenager playing for Pencoed RFC to much-capped Welsh captain, it is assembled from interviews with colleagues, family and Thomas himself (though not, seemingly, his ex-wife). Soans also braids in teenagers’ accounts of life in Bridgend, one of many towns left on the slagheap of history after the coalfields closed.
It is a noble effort that is fitfully successful. There’s no denying the power of Thomas’s story – or his gap-toothed charm – but Soans’s eagerness to tackle everything from homophobia in sport to the number of suicides in south Wales (something also covered by NTW’s 2010 Love Steals Us from Loneliness) gives it the feeling of a well-intentioned research project rather than something that lives and breathes the passion of its subject. Stranded between 1930s-style Living Newspaper and self-help session, it’s not helped by Max Stafford-Clark’s foursquare production that could do with a dose of Alfie’s rampaging speed on the pitch to help it come alive.
Nonetheless, the six-strong cast work hard, embodying everyone from Thomas’s rugby-mad parents to Neil Kinnock, and it’s hard not to be moved by a tale both universal and highly particular. “I knew he was better when he was back on the Jaffa cakes,” says Thomas’s irrepressible mum, Vonnie. “Cheeky sod.”
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