The Beautiful Game

There’s bound to be plenty of drama on the pitch and court in the coming months, but what about sport on stage?

- Michael Billington

WE are surrounded everywhere by sport: the football World Cup is under way in Russia, England is playing Australia at cricket and Wimbledon beckons. Over the next few weeks, we shall hear a lot about the drama of sport, but what about the role of sport in drama? I would suggest that, after decades of relative neglect, it’s starting to assert itself in a major way and that dramatists are waking up to the huge possibilities of the sporting life.

Plays about football, now elevated from a pleasurable pastime into a national obsession, have, in particular, started to proliferate. It would be hard on stage to match the real-life drama of, say, Arsène Wenger’s eventual departure from his beloved Arsenal, but what the theatre can do is to use football as a metaphor for a bellicose and divided Britain—or, more precisely England, as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have sporting cultures of their own.

One of the best modern football plays was Roy Williams’s Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads, seen at the National Theatre in 2002. Set in a London pub on an October afternoon when England were playing Germany in a World Cup qualifier, the play captured perfectly the complexities of Anglicised racism. On the one hand, the pub’s own team had a measure of bigotry. However, once the lads settled down to watch the big match on TV, their own racial differences were subsumed by a tribal hatred of Germany.

All good plays are metaphors, but sporting drama has a particular ability to explore wider issues. Clearly, someone at the National Theatre adores football as, in 2015, it came up with another first-rate footie play in Patrick Marber’s The Red Lion. This time, the focus was on a non-league, semi-pro team used to playing on dandelion-covered pitches and relying on ‘lonesome duffers’ to act as match-day volunteers.