by Will anyone think of the playwrights? Victory in Sunday’s Euro final clinched the perfect finish from James Graham, who is currently updating his Dear England football beat to return to the stage next year. Still, at least Gareth Southgate’s men didn’t go out in their quarter-final against Switzerland. The possibility of a campaign ending without penalties led to a flurry of texts between Graham and director Rupert Goold at the end of the extra-time period.
Sports are having a moment in the theater. Red Pitch, like Dear England, used football to explore what it means to live in the UK today, exploring nobility through the lives of three hopeful teenagers on a South London estate. Red Speedo, which follows an elite swimmer caught doping, has just opened at the Orange Tree. Director Matthew Dunster has been working on the project for six years. “It’s the smoothest drama about capitalism I’ve come across in a long time – all the moral compromises the characters make in the name of success.” Kate Attwell’s Testmatch was recently shown in the same space, exploring racism and other colonial legacies through two cricket matches set 200 years apart.
I was confused as to why doping wasn’t as balanced as other performance enhancing factors, like who can afford more training
This month, Hannah Kumari’s play about teenage fans of Coventry City in 90s Eng-er-land arrives in King’s Head, London, for South Asian Heritage Month. Meanwhile, in Stewart Pringle’s The Bounds, at Newcastle’s Live theater and London’s Royal Court, two football obsessives nervously await the result of a local derby – the twist being that Northumberland’s pitch is a mile wide, as this is the Shrovetide game of 1553. When a mysterious stranger shows up, the religious and political conflicts of the Reformation take us from fan-based comedy to folk horror.
Pringle was inspired by the long-running and often violent inter-village football matches after visiting Tudor House in Margate, and after researching the historical background, discovered that the sport itself a “political football for the church and reform forces. within the country”. “That felt like he had a lot to say,” reflects Pringle, who premiered his work in Newcastle in June. “Especially with the way the north of England has been buffeted by the winds of political change without much thought.”
The atavistic affiliations of sport are useful proxies when grappling with questions of identity, whether geographical or social. Attwell describes it as a “volatile territory” full of “great patriotism and ancient sentiments”. “It makes sense as a territory for theater artists to want to work in,” says the South African-born playwright, who also served as associate director of the New York production of Red Speedo. “It makes promises clearly, because the audience can immediately understand what the terms are.”
Testmatch premiered in San Francisco, a city not known for its cricketers, and Attwell admits that American audiences were unlikely to get the “grainy pie of the metaphor”. “But at the same time, there is an almost Brechtian dimension to American history. The legacy of slavery continues to have a huge and deeply felt influence on contemporary culture.”
Attwell was not a cricket fan before she wrote the play – she happened to see a women’s T20 match on TV one day. The American playwright Lucas Hnath, who wrote Red Speedo, also came to the sport “like an alien visiting the Earth”, especially when he was threatened by the emotional response to the Balco doping scandal in baseball.
“People were very upset about it,” says Hnath, “but I didn’t really understand why it was an issue worth a congressional hearing. I was confused about how doping was equal to any other performance enhancing factors, such as who can afford to train more.” That question shaped a play he calls “a thought experiment about how we draw the line between what’s fair and what’s not.” “Sports is an area where it feels really black and white, and to challenge what’s disturbing in a way that I don’t know people are always 100% aware of.”
When I told my agent I wanted to write a play about 16th century football, he started taking me to QPR games
Rajiv Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, has long understood the powerful and irrational emotions attached to fandom. “The people of the city are fanatical about their sports teams and the whole mood depends on their performance,” says Joseph, whose basketball game King James debuted in Chicago in 2022. “Which explains why the mood in Cleveland has always been quite depressed . .”
King James, which will receive its UK premiere at the Hampstead theater in November, follows the friendship of two men during the dramatic careers – and departures – of each of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ best players. “In a small market like Cleveland, the presence of an athlete and celebrity like LeBron James has a huge economic impact,” says Joseph. “When he left, the loss was huge and he began to feel like a deity who would favor the land for a while and that the crops would prosper… that’s how it feels to be a Cleveland fans.”
For Don Pringle, a lover of football and a longtime fan of the Chicago Cubs, his first encounter with the terraces at Loftus Road gave him a new perspective on humanity. “When I told my agent I wanted to write a play about 16th century football, he said well you have to start coming to some games like that, because you don’t know anything about it. And he’s a big QPR fan, so he started taking me to games.” It was a good fit for Pringle, who had little interest in trophy-winning teams.
“I felt a real connection to how the fans loved and cheered on their team. It’s a mix of hope and despair that’s really appealing … there’s something heroic and beautiful and very human about that.”
Dunster can say, having blocked the dates of England’s matches at the Euros in his diary as soon as they were announced six months ago. “We don’t just rely on sport for entertainment, or how we benefit the global economy, we also rely on it to determine what kind of summer we have,” he says. “Euro 96 was the first time I can remember a sporting event that changed the way we felt as a nation. And that lovely, lovely period from Britain, I think that’s what Dear England was taking advantage of.”
For some, the biggest appeal of sports-based drama is its ability to celebrate the underdog. Along with Trevor Wood, Ed Waugh co-writes award-winning plays based on the unheralded athletes of the north-east, including rowing pioneer miner Harry Clasper, and world champion boxer Glenn McCrory. Wor Bella, which toured London and Newcastle earlier this year, tells the story of centre-forward Bella Reay who scored 133 goals for Blyth Spartans in the 1917-1918 season.
“It’s certainly about football, but it’s also about the role of women in society,” says Waugh, “how they gave everything to save the war effort, but how they were undermined and told go back to town and procreate again.”
For Waugh, plays about sport clearly have an appeal: they bring in punters. “We get people who have never been to the theater before,” he says. “Not everyone likes football, but everyone knows about the sport.” Pringle echoes this: having a football angle to his playing made him “very attractive” to Live theater in Newcastle.
Dunster, an advocate of publicist theatre, recommends plays like Wor Bella: “If we just do theater about theatre, you’re diminishing your audience in a futile and existential way.” Ten years ago, he directed Luke Barnes’ The Saints, at a pop-up theater in Southampton that was created in the town center on the way between the pubs and the stadium, and which served as an advertisement for the team’s own fans. the play there. about. “It was literally built to attract a new audience.”
Red Speedo, with its text-heavy monologues, “annoyed” commercial theater producers, says Dunster, one reason for this production’s long gestation period. But while there is a certain abstraction to the play, lead actor Finn Cole has shown a serious commitment to realism, spending months on a diet and training regimen. Why the need? “A swimmer’s body shape is quite unique,” says Dunster, “and he’s in Speedos all the time.”
There’s more: Cole will be waxed “from head to toe” by opening night, says the director. “His girlfriend has booked the place so she can video him when he’s done. We all want to see that video.”
• Red Speedo is at the Orange Tree Theatre, London, until 10 August. King James is at Hampstead theatre, London, 15 November – 4 January. His Friend England is at the National Theatre, London, 10 March – 24 May 2025
