Roy tackles race head on

"Posh Spice likes it up the arse..." goes a line of dialogue in Roy Williams's new play. So that would be a play about the terraces, then. Football has an instantly identifiable rhetoric, one that is an integral part of the fabric of Saturday afternoons for thousands of people. And one which, at its worst, is frequently appalling. As Williams discovered for himself, one afternoon in a Birmingham pub during the England-Germany match of Euro 2000.

'I was cheering England on with everyone else, enjoying myself. And then it got nasty. "Dirty German bastards," that sort of stuff and worse. And there's me, black, in the middle. And naturally I started to get some stick.'

Williams, one of our most promising young playwrights, and a passionate QPR supporter, had been thinking about what it means to be British for blacks and whites for some time. Football, with its entrenched rituals, its own sense of theatre, and inherent paradox of symbolising both unity and difference, was the perfect backdrop. And so Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads is set in a pub during an England-Germany match, and raises disturbing questions about inter-racial relations in this country.

Williams has been writing about this subject ever since his first play, No-Boys Cricket Club, was produced at Stratford East in 1995. He believes that the single most complicating factor in the debate is honesty, or rather a lack of it. His play features a group of white fans and two black brothers - Barry, who sings with more fervour than anyone, and Mark, something of an outsider. 'The only honest character is Alan [a white member], who may have extreme views but who at least applies them with intelligence and logic,' says Williams. 'He lays down the gauntlet to Mark, tells him that multiculturalism in this country is a lie, that if he believes in it then he's naive. Alan's unpleasant, but his view is: we've got to start talking frankly. And he's got a point.'

Indeed he has. The day Williams and I meet, France had woken up in shock to the real prospect of a hard-right president. The reasons behind the poll results are many and complicated, but a contributing factor had arguably been a lack of public dialogue on the subject of race.

Williams's play is notable for its pessimism; its ending, involving a 13-year-old, is shocking and savage. 'My plays normally have hope, but some people out there believe what I'm writing about is hopeless. But again: that's my point. Racism is not a generational thing. If we are not careful, today's school kids could become tomorrow's National Front.'

That the play kickstarts Transformation, a new season at the National, is something Williams is particularly proud of. The upstairs exhibition space in the foyer has been converted into a 100-seat theatre which, over the next five months, will produce eight short, sharp brutal plays with cut-price tickets. The Lyttelton has been slightly converted, and will be putting on more experimental work from the likes of Deborah Warner and Kathryn Hunter. The idea is part of an initiative to encourage new audiences to the National, an institution frequently criticised for being out of touch with people under 30. Inevitably there is talk of late licences and DJs playing after the shows.

Of course, no-one with little previous interest in theatre, whatever their age, is going to suddenly go just because an executive has told them it is new, exciting and has live music in the bar afterwards to prove it. By the same token, no-one can knock the National for trying. Williams himself believes that, even within the context of race alone, opening up access to the theatre can only be a good thing. 'If black kids see someone like me with a play on at the National, then of course it's going to encourage them to think they can do that too. There's still a deplorable lack of black people represented in the arts. We can't live off Denzel Washington's Oscar forever.'