His name was Icky and there was hate in his eyes.

He looked out of place inside the little theatre in Brighton. He seemed better suited to the door of a nightclub, or the inside of a police station lock-up.

At the end of the play, he was introduced to the director. He spoke just one word. "Accurate."

Then he disappeared into the shadows.

The director in question, Paul Hodson, tells the story from the distance of several months, with an appalled amusement. "You get a good review in the Guardian and that's one thing - but a word of praise from someone like that, and you've really done the business," he says.

"Someone like that", is one of the outcasts of the 'Beautiful Game' of the Nineties; the professional thugs who were once the voice of British football but who have been pushed by money and marketing on to the game's fringes.

Icky is an associate of the author John King, and his role model when he decided to document the nasty little lives of the soccer hard-cases in a novel called The Football Factory.

To Hodson fell the task of turning the book into a stage production. His play, both acclaimed and controversial, comes to Bradford in a fortnight as part of a national tour.

It represents the other side of the referee's coin to Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. Hodson was shocked by its content.

"Football violence hasn't gone away," he says. "It's just gone underground.

"You saw what happened in Marseilles during the World Cup. That's the sort of thing we're dealing with here.

"It's become a sub-culture. The 'firms' have moved away from where the security cameras are. They're cleverer than that. It's now organised, underground warfare.

"Some of the fights are even pre-arranged. And it's not just in England. There was a terrible incident in Holland this year involving Ajax and Feyenoord. It was 1,000-a-side on a field 20 miles out of town - and someone was actually killed. It's extraordinary."

Hodson, a passionate football supporter who also adapted Fever Pitch for the stage, admits he was at first repulsed by King's novel.

"Like a lot of other fans, I put it down after the first few chapters. I just felt it was pornographic; I didn't want to be associated with it.

"But I found myself picking it up again. I was horrified and disgusted but I couldn't help wanting to know what happens next - why these people do it and where they come from. That's the fascination.

"It's not about football; it's about tribes - people who are obsessed with violence as opposed to being obsessed with football."

Sky Television had a lot to do with driving the thugs out of football's mainstream, he says. "It was the money and the gentrification of the game that did it. Football became sexy and you couldn't promote it as a family sport with these chaps hanging about.

"But in a way, they've hardened up since then. They're prouder of what they do."

He is, he says, amazed at how few people have walked out of the theatre, given the characters and the language.

"It's not for the faint-hearted. It's revelatory, yes, but it's a pretty outrageous culture that we're revealing."

Tom Johnson - Icky by any other name - is the character at the centre of The Football Factory. His Chelsea firm fights, takes drugs and has sleazy sex in every town in In-ger-land where there's a Premier League team.

His mates are Mark and Rod. His other mate is Vince, who has grown out of violence. Vince's grandfather helped to liberate Auschwitz and can offer a different perspective on violence for the sake of it.

"We've staged it with six people, but in reality there are hundreds involved," says Hodson. "We've focussed on the heart of the firm: the leader and his lieutenants."

A six-handed performance, in fact, is unusually ambitious for Hodson's Brighton Theatre Events company: many of its previous plays, including Fever Pitch and Bill Bryson's Lost Continent, have been solo pieces.

"We wanted to move up a step and do bigger shows," he says. "We've been doing one and two-people shows for years and years. Obviously they're cheaper to do, but I don't think we could have attempted anything on this scale as a solo performance. It's about a tribe and it needs interaction."

He has not, he says, pitched the play at football hooligans.

"We're not aiming to get an audience full of people who are going to dismantle the theatre when the show's over.

"What it comes down to is a simple, horrible fascination with what's going on."

l The Football Factory is at the Alhambra Studio, Bradford, on Friday and Saturday, December 4 and 5. Tickets are bookable on 01274 752000.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.