Will no one be thinking of the playwrights? Defeat in Sunday’s European Championship final robbed James Graham of the perfect ending, currently updating his football hit Dear England for a return to the scene next year. Still, at least Gareth Southgate’s men were not eliminated on penalties in the quarter-finals against Switzerland. The prospect of an unimpressive campaign ending on penalties prompted a series of messages between Graham and director Rupert Goold at the end of extra time.
Sport is having a moment in theatre. Like Dear England, Red Pitch used football to explore what it means to live in England today, examining gentrification through the lives of three young hopefuls on a south London estate. Red Speedo, about an elite swimmer caught doping, has just opened at the Orange Tree. Director Matthew Dunster has been following the project for six years. “It’s the most finely tuned play about capitalism I’ve seen in a long time – all the moral compromises the characters make in the name of success.” Kate Attwell’s Testmatch was recently staged at the same venue, questioning racism and other colonial legacies through two cricket matches played 200 years apart.
I couldn’t understand why doping was less fair than other performance enhancers, for example, who can afford to train more?
This month, Hannah Kumari’s play Eng-er-land, about her teenage years as a Coventry City fan in the 90s, comes to the King’s Head in London as part of South Asian Heritage Month. Meanwhile, in Stewart Pringle’s The Bounds, at Newcastle’s Live theatre and London’s Royal Court, two football fans nervously await the result of a local derby – the twist being that the Northumberland ground is miles wide, because this is the Shrovetide fixture from 1553. When a mysterious stranger turns up, the religious and political conflicts of the Reformation push us from fan-based comedy to folk fear.
Pringle became interested in the long-standing, often violent, inter-village football matches after visiting Tudor House in Margate, and when he delved into its historical background he discovered that the sport itself had become “a political football for the church and the forces of reform within the country”. “It felt like it had a lot to say,” reflects Pringle, whose work premiered in Newcastle in June. “It was particularly about the north of England being swept along by the winds of political change without much thought.”
The sport’s atavistic allegiances are a useful proxy for grappling with questions of identity, whether geographical or social. Attwell describes it as a “volatile terrain,” full of “fierce patriotism and ancient emotion.” “It makes sense as an area where theatre artists would want to work,” says the South African-born playwright, who also served as associate director on Red Speedo’s New York production. “It presents the stakes very clearly, because the audience can immediately understand what the terms are.”
Testmatch premiered in San Francisco, a city not known for its cricket followers, and Attwell admits that American audiences are unlikely to notice “the granular details of the metaphor”. “But at the same time, there’s an almost Brechtian distance to it that definitely resonates with American history. The legacy of slavery still has a huge impact on contemporary culture, so it was very much felt.”
Attwell was not a cricket fan before writing the play – she happened to catch a women’s T20 match on TV one day. Lucas Hnath, the American playwright who wrote Red Speedo, also took to the sport “like an alien visiting Earth”, particularly when he was struck by the emotional response to the Balco scandal over doping in baseball.
“People were pretty upset about it,” Hnath says, “but I didn’t really understand why it was a subject worthy of a congressional hearing. I couldn’t understand why doping was any less fair than other performance-enhancing agents, like who could afford to train more.” That question shaped a game he describes as “a thought experiment about how we draw the line between what’s fair and what’s not.” “Sports is an arena that feels really black and white, and questioning that is uncomfortable in a way that people are always 100% aware of.”
When I told my manager I wanted to write a play about 16th century football he started taking me to QPR matches
Rajiv Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, has long understood the powerful and irrational feelings of fandom. “The city’s people are fanatical about their sports teams, and their whole mood is tied to their performance,” says Joseph, whose basketball game King James will debut in Chicago in 2022. “That explains why the mood in Cleveland is always pretty depressed.”
King James, which had its UK premiere at the Hampstead Theatre in November, is about the dramatic career of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ greatest player and the friendship between two men during his departure. “In a small market like Cleveland, the presence of an athlete and a celebrity like LeBron James has a huge economic impact,” says Joseph. “When he left, the loss was huge and for a while he started to feel like he was a god who was going to protect the land and the crops… that’s what it’s like to be a Cleveland fan.”
For baseball enthusiast Pringle, a long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan, his first encounter with the stands 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’ve got to start coming to the games because you don’t know anything about it.’ And he’s a big QPR fan, so he started taking me to the games.” It was a good fit for Pringle, who had little interest in trophy-winning teams.
“I felt a real connection with the fans both loving and supporting their team. It’s that combination of hope and despair that’s really appealing… There’s something heroic and lovely and very human about that.”
Dunster can relate to the fact that he had marked down the dates of England’s European Championship matches in his diary as soon as they were announced six months ago. “We don’t just rely on sport for entertainment or how we access the global economy, we rely on it to determine what kind of summer we’re going to have,” he says. “Euro 96 was the first time I can remember a sporting event changing how we feel as a nation. And that feel-good, cool Britain era is what I think Dear England was reaching for.”
For some, the great appeal of sports-based drama is its ability to celebrate the underdog. Along with Trevor Wood, Ed Waugh has co-written award-winning plays based on unknown north-east athletes such as miner-turned-shovel pioneer 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 1917-18 season.
“It’s about football, of course, but it’s also about the role of women in society,” Waugh says. “How they gave everything to save the war effort, but were undermined and told they had to go home and have children again.”
There is an obvious appeal to plays about sports, says Waugh: they draw punters in. “We get people who have never been to a theatre before,” he says. “Not everyone loves football, but everyone knows the sport.” Pringle agrees: the fact that his play is about football made it “extremely attractive” to Newcastle’s Live theatre.
A champion of populist, commercial theatre, Dunster applauds plays such as Wor Bella: “If we make theatre just about theatre, you’re diminishing your audience in a futile and existential way.” A decade ago, he directed Luke Barnes’s The Saints in a pop-up theatre created in the city centre on the road between the pubs and the stadium in Southampton, which served as an advertisement for the fans of the team it was about. “It was really built to capture a new audience.”
Red Speedo, with its script-heavy monologues, made commercial theater producers “nervous,” Dunster says, which was one reason for this production’s long gestation period. But while there’s a certain abstraction to the play, lead actor Finn Cole has made a serious commitment to realism and has been on a diet and workout regimen for months. Why is it necessary? “A swimmer’s body shape is pretty unique,” Dunster says, “and he’s always wearing a Speedo.”
There’s more: The director says Cole will be waxed “head to toe” by opening night. “His girlfriend booked this place so she could videotape him getting waxed. We all want to see that video.”
• Red Speedo is at the Orange Tree Theatre, London, until August 10. King James is at the Hampstead Theatre, London, from November 15 to January 4. Dear England is at the National Theatre, London, from March 10 to May 24, 2025.