Eng-Er-Land review – why Lizzie the football fan wants to be thinner, prettier and whiter

Lizzie is a football-mad teenager who, dressed in a Coventry FC shirt, begins confiding in us about her life. She was born in England to an Indian mother and a Scottish father, and is stranded between those identities.

Hannah Kumari’s monologue steers between the travails of adolescent life and school crushes to blended family angst and the difficult navigation of her protagonist’s identity in a place and time in which she feels isolated. It is the late 1990s in Rugby (there are references to the British National party as well as Tony Blair’s New Labour) and Lizzie hears racist taunts on the football terraces and from her peers. It all leaves her wishing to be thinner, prettier and whiter.

As an addition to the recent tranche of dramas that use the beautiful game to explore issues of identity, belonging and Britishness (such as Red Pitch and Dear England ), this play has charm but it does not build in momentum and feels sketchy and diffused.

Lizzie (Nikhita Lesler) could be the mixed heritage heir to Bend It Like Beckham’s football-mad Jesminder. Under the direction of Max Lindsay, Lesler plays the protagonist with wide-eyed charm and sometimes squealing overexcitement on a bare stage, but she explains who she is too much, without quite coming to life.

The drama relies on exposition with a random burst of dance and an audience singalong, and it feels as if the tone of the story veers this way and that. Thirty minutes in, Lizzie is still on her way to a football match and the pace lags.

The material on living in between worlds sounds authentic but it is too overfamiliar and insufficiently fleshed out as Lizzie speaks of not feeling Indian enough nor being seen as British enough.

There is an interesting moment in which she ruminates on what comprises belonging: where you are from, factually, or where you feel you are from. But this is one among other thoughts that feel strung together and undigested.

The performance has spirit and the play has the potential to develop its intrigues as a story, along with some nice writing, but, ultimately, this hour-long monologue never finds its feet.

• At King’s Head theatre, London , until 10 August