Sprowston Boy is a winner

Posted on 24th November 2023

In the mid 80s, salesman Geoff Whiting and coal merchant Kenny Blanch bought a racehorse and named it after the road they both grew up on. The horse went on to romp home ahead of the pack at Royal Ascot, despite Sprowston Boy being a rank outsider.

Whiting’s granddaughter, Katie-anna, has taken the bare bones of this unlikely victory and fashioned them into a polished stage production in which she acts alongside Florence Wright. Using a bold mix of filmed inserts, archive footage and exotic headgear, the two of them take us back to a time that, despite being within the living memory of their Corn Hall audience, feels like a tale of a bygone era. Granted, there is talk of the relationship between humans and horses, much of which is accompanied by handsome visuals, but the title of Horse Play is something of a misnomer. Time and again Katie-Anna Whiting’s text focuses on the appalling misogyny that was suffocating the sport. While the enlightened attitude of Geoff Whiting and Kenny Blanch are hinted at, and we get to hear from Sprowston Boy himself, the emphasis is on Gay Kelleway, the female jockey they put their faith in. Plum voiced commentators and Hogarthian punters look on in swivel-eyed wonder as a woman dares to take on the almost exclusively male world of horse racing.

Wright and Whiting have a lot of fun having a poke at attitudes that were ludicrously outdated even at the time, though tellingly one of the most effective scenes is the chilling, and distinctively unfunny, confrontation between a predatory celebrity jockey and Kelleway in the kitchen she is required to change in. We would like to think things have changed, but it’s a sobering thought that it would be another 32 years before another female jockey would cross the finish line first.