Will no one think of the playwrights? Sunday’s defeat in the European Championship final stole the perfect ending from James Graham, who is currently updating his football hit Dear England for its return to the stage next year. Yet at least Gareth Southgate’s men did not go out in their quarter-final against Switzerland. The possibility of a disappointing campaign ending on penalties prompted a flurry of texts between Graham and director Rupert Goold at the end of extra time.
Sport is making a comeback in theatre. Red Pitch, like Dear England, used football to explore what it means to live in the UK today, examining gentrification through the lives of three 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 pursuing the project for six years. “It’s the most sophisticated play 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 Test Match was recently staged in the same space, examining racism and other colonial legacies through two cricket matches set 200 years apart.
I didn’t understand why doping would be less fair than other performance enhancing elements, such as who can afford more training
This month, Hannah Kumari’s play about her teenage years as a Coventry City fan in the 1990s, Eng-er-land, arrives at London’s King’s Head for South Asian Heritage Month. Meanwhile, in Stewart Pringle’s The Bounds, at Newcastle’s Live Theatre and London’s Royal Court, two football fanatics anxiously await the outcome of a local derby. The punchline is that the Northumberland pitch is miles wide, because this is the Shrove Tuesday match of 1553. When a mysterious stranger turns up, the religious and political conflicts of the Reformation take us from fan-based comedy to folk horror.
Pringle became fascinated by the long-running and often violent inter-village football matches after visiting Tudor House in Margate, and when he researched the historical background he discovered that the sport itself had become “a political football for the church and reforming forces in the country”. “That felt like it had a lot to say”, reflects Pringle, whose work premiered in Newcastle in June. “Particularly about the way the north of England has been buffeted by the winds of political change without much notice.”
Sport’s atavistic affiliations are a useful proxy for grappling with questions of identity, whether geographic or social. Attwell describes it as a “volatile area” full of “fierce patriotism and old feelings.” “It makes sense as a terrain for theater artists to want to work in,” says the South African-born playwright, who also served as associate director on the New York production of Red Speedo . “It’s very clearly staked, because the audience can immediately understand what the terms are.”
Test Match premiered in San Francisco, a city not known for its cricketing following, and Attwell admits that American audiences probably wouldn’t pick up on the “granularity of the metaphor”. “But at the same time, there’s an almost Brechtian distance that certainly resonated with American history. The legacy of slavery still has a huge impact on contemporary culture, so that was very palpable.”
Attwell wasn’t a cricket fan before writing the play – she happened to catch a women’s T20 match on TV one day. American playwright Lucas Hnath, who wrote Red Speedo, also came to the sport “like an alien visiting Earth”, especially when he was taken aback by the emotional response to the Balco scandal about doping in baseball.
“People were pretty angry about it,” Hnath says, “but I didn’t really understand why it was a topic that was worth a congressional hearing. I didn’t understand why doping was less fair than a number of other performance-enhancing elements, like who can afford more training.” That question formed the basis for a play he describes as “a thought experiment about how we draw the line between what’s fair and what’s not.” “Sports is an arena where it feels very black and white, and to question that is disturbing in a way that I don’t know if people are always 100% aware of.”
When I told my agent I wanted to write a play about football in the 16th century, he started taking me to QPR games
Rajiv Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, has long understood the powerful and irrational feelings attached to fandom. “People in the city are fanatical about their sports teams, and the whole mood is dependent on their performance,” says Joseph, whose King James basketball game debuts in Chicago in 2022. “Which explains why the mood in Cleveland has always been pretty depressed.”
King James, which opens in November at Britain’s Hampstead Theatre, follows the friendship of two men through the dramatic career—and departure—of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ best player. “In a small market like Cleveland, having an athlete and a celebrity like LeBron James has a huge economic impact,” Joseph says. “When he left, the loss was enormous and he started to feel like a deity who would grace the land for a while and the crops would flourish … that’s what it’s like to be a Cleveland fan.”
For the baseball-loving Pringle, a long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan, a first encounter with the stands at Loftus Road gave him a new perspective on humanity. “When I said to my agent I wanted to write a play about 16th-century football, he said, well, you’ll have to come to games 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 teams that won trophies.
“I felt a real kinship with the way the fans loved and admired their team. It’s a combination of hope and hopelessness that’s really appealing… there’s something heroic, sweet and very human about it.”
Dunster can relate, having pencilled in England’s Euro 2016 fixtures in his diary when they were announced six months ago. “We don’t just rely on sport for entertainment, or how we engage with the global economy, we rely on it to define what kind of summer we have,” he says. “Euro 96 was the first time I can remember that a sporting event changed how we felt as a nation. And that feelgood, cool Britannia period, I think Dear England tapped into that.”
For some, the great appeal of sports drama is its ability to celebrate the underdog. With Trevor Wood, Ed Waugh writes award-winning plays about unsung athletes from the North East, including miner Harry Clasper, rowing pioneer, and world boxing champion Glenn McCrory. Wor Bella, which toured London and Newcastle earlier this year, tells the story of striker 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,” says Waugh, “how they gave everything they had to save the war effort, but were undermined and told to go back home and have children again.”
For Waugh, plays about sport have an obvious appeal: they attract gamblers. “We attract people who have never been to the theatre before,” he says. “Not everyone likes football, but everyone knows about sport.” Pringle agrees: the fact that his play had a football angle made it “hugely attractive” to Newcastle’s Live Theatre.
Dunster, a proponent of populist, commercial theatre, applauds plays like Wor Bella: “If we just make theatre about theatre, then you’re diminishing your audience in a pointless and existential way.” A decade ago, he directed Luke Barnes’s The Saints, in a pop-up theatre in Southampton that had been created in the city centre on the way from the pubs to the stadium, and served as an advertisement for fans of the team the play was about. “It was literally built to reach a new audience.”
Red Speedo, with its text-heavy monologues, made commercial theater producers “nervous,” Dunster says, one reason for this production’s long gestation. But while there’s a certain abstraction to the piece, lead actor Finn Cole has shown a serious commitment to realism, following a months-long diet and exercise regimen. Why the necessity? “A swimmer’s body shape is quite unique,” Dunster says, “and he wears Speedos all the time.”
And there’s more: Cole will also be waxed “from head to toe” on opening night, the director says. “His girlfriend booked the place so she can film him getting it done. We all want to see that video.”
• Red Speedo runs at the Orange Tree Theatre, London, until 10 August. King James runs at the Hampstead Theatre, London, from 15 November to 4 January. Dear England runs at the National Theatre, London, from 10 March to 24 May 2025