I thought about prefacing this review with the caveat that I am not a football fan, but really it’s more appropriate to tell you that I grew up in a football-mad family. I’ve seen the fervour that football can inspire in boys and men (and others besides, though Would You Bet Against Us? focuses on a father-son dynamic). Bar the occasional moment of World Cup-induced enthusiasm, or excitement by proxy for my brother or dad, I’ve not been grabbed by the so-called beautiful game. Yet there I was, chanting, clapping and stamping my feet watching two miniature figurines tussling over a ball atop an astroturfed piano.

Aston Villa are one of only five English clubs to have won the European Cup. Paul Hunter was 16 years old when his home team headed to Rotterdam to play Bayern Munich in the final,.  He’d recently discovered a love of all things theatrical, his father had just passed away, and his geography teacher had told him he would amount to nothing.

This is a celebration of sporting achievement, sure. The subtitle for the show reads “A celebration of Aston Villa’s greatest triumph”, which is true, but Would You Bet Against Us? is more than that. Hunter’s show moves beyond football fandom, or rather, takes elements from that experience and expands them. Passion, determination, risk, family, community: this is an underdog story we can all get behind, football fans or not.

Hunter weaves a personal story with that of the team’s journey to victory, slingshotting the audience from an early performance at the Edinburgh Fringe playing every one of Shakespeare’s Fools (side-bar: I’d watch that) to his first time at a stadium at 6 years old to his own son denying that the Claret and Blue ever won.

To help him along in this “one-man” show are Lori Hopkins, Heather Lai and Kyll Thomas-Cole. All do sterling physical work and handle the show’s vast array of lo-fi tricks in a way that makes it seem thrown together but you know really takes a huge amount of work.

Tone is deftly managed throughout. Hunter is a bit of a Fool himself – a very clever Fool. Capably drawing pathos out of his interactions with a puppet simulacrum of his dad but never allowing us to sit in any moment too long, Hunter interrupts the sadness with a silly joke or a slapstick jaunt. It all works.