The World Cup comes round again and football fans not heading for Japan could do no better than taking the terraces at the Bush in Mike Packer's terrific new play. Go back a bit to Euro 2000 when the Bush Theatre commissioned Packer to follow the ticket touts to Brussels. England played Germany and that was the only contest that seemed to matter, if the tabloids were anything to go by. Packer watched spirited speculators rid themselves of three hundred tickets twenty four hours before a match, and out of the experience has conjured the comic odyssey of Baz and Tosser, whose ducking and diving excited so much laughter from the audience that pathos and truth-telling manifested itself only the louder in the wake of so much ignorance and savvy. The inscrutable maths of Cockney rhyming slang provides the title and the point as far as these two are concerned: "No money is the root of all fucking evil. Not Money. No fucking money". Money is certainly speaking here and human communication considered better veiled if honesty is not to hamper you. 
      Baz has sold his ticket agency for two million but now he's lost it all on dot.com shares. As well as creditors at the door there is his wife and her credit cards to contend with, and add to this a heart problem. He desperately needs help to "knock 'em out". Tosser joins in this unenviable enterprise but it's meat and drink to the younger man, who is a sidekick of the highest order ("I do love watching you fucking wriggle" ) and he makes a very convincing football supporter too, once they move from the first scene of the Soho betting shop to a hotel room in Brussels. 
      Enter Al and Kate as the professional footballer and the footballer's professional girlfriend. He's black, she's blonde, and they both appear curiously innocent by contrast to the main contenders; talent and beauty entwined in mercenary embrace. But they all have secrets, and "the Fatherland" as well as Bradford City and the News of the World might prompt legacies of their own before the games are over. The preoccupations of Baz set against the divine unconcerns of Tosser, painted face resplendent in the white and red of St George, inevitably results in some blood-letting and Tosser hoist to his own petard, but I won't reveal the fun Baz has in spite of the palpitations nor the final outcome of their Belgian adventure; only that the issues of race and identity are amplified roundly by these four characters, where the racist is gauche, artless, powerless, and the black man can boast "this spade is a role model and he's living your dream life". 
      Philip Jackson makes of Baz a hugely likeable character (a continent away from his Inspector Japp in ITV's "Poirot"), with his inability to follow a straight line being less of a deviance than a genetic inheritance. The mobile phone that protects him also plays "Only Fools and Horses" as its signature tune which is nevertheless one ahead of Nicolas Tennant's Tosser who brings a brilliant burst of idiotic energy across Jackson's taedium vitae. Lucy Punch is a knockout her comic timing as impeccable as the duo - and Clint Dyer as Al, the "Rambo" of the football pitch, is the incarnation of this new shiny-suited species of millionaire, divined chiefly through the pages of OK especially by their girlfriends. A line of TV screens provide a perfect elaboration to the action adding their own fatuous commentary in sound and image. Definitely One-nil.
Crystal Lindsay