Play the game
There’s a lot of drama in sport. So why, I wonder, is there so little sport in drama? The thought came to me while watching Richard Bean’s The English Game on tour at Guildford. This cracking play (it arrives at Kingston’s Rose Theatre this month) uses cricket as a metaphor for the splits and fissures in English life. Yet, as I watched a Surrey audience lapping up Bean’s joke-filled state-of-the-nation play, I found myself puzzling over why theatre still takes a slightly sniffy attitude to sport.
Cricket hasn’t done too badly. Richard Harris’ Outside Edge caught the tension amongst the tea-making wives on the boundary: I remember my old sports journalist mate, Frank Keating, coming up to me on the first night and wittily describing it as “Ayckbourn off a shorter run”. And the great Ayckbourn himself included an off-stage cricket-match in Time and Time Again. You could also add to the list Terrence Rattigan’s TV play and film The Final Test, and the cricketing metaphors that pepper Pinter’s work. But it’s taken Bean to realise that cricket has a lot to tell us about who we are: just as the spirit of cricket is being eroded, so, Bean suggests, our native tradition of tolerance is being capsized by saloon-bar racism and the anti-Islamist stance of bullying media pundits.
Only a handful of other dramatists have cottoned on to the fact that sport is not just a national obsession: it also reveals a lot about social identity. David Storey’s The Changing Room brilliantly used a Rugby League locker room to explore the rigid class structures of English life. Rugby League found another laureate in John Godber whose Up ‘n’ Under famously celebrated the English love of puny Davids battling against mighty Goliaths. But, despite a brief flurry of soccer plays that usually coincide with a World Cup, the only ones that stick in the memory are Peter Terson’s Zigger Zagger, which caught the noise and banter of the 1960s terraces, and Roy Williams’ Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, which used an England-Germany game to pin down our society’s insidious racism.
Obviously there are problems about dramatising sport. There’s the purely physical aspect of the game itself. There is also the fact that most team games require large numbers. But the real problem, I suspect, is that we still associate sport with men. Many of the plays I’ve mentioned have all-male casts. Yet large numbers of women play, watch, read about and now commentate on sport – a fact that seems to have escaped British theatre. If sporting plays are still regarded as box office poison, it’s because they tend to exclude half the population, the ticket-buying half at that.
In putting in a plea for more plays about sport, I’m not suggesting we fill the stage with surrogate games. It’s the politics of sport that cries out for dramatisation. Everywhere you look – from lawn tennis to rugby union – sport seems to be going through some form of crisis where the original ethos is being undermined by money and power. If this isn’t the stuff of drama, I don’t know what is.
Yet, even though one of the liveliest West End producers, Bill Kenwright, is chairman of Everton FC and even though all the writers, directors and actors I know live and breathe sport, it still gets marginal showing on British stages. Perhaps we shall all have to head to Australia where I’m told there’s a musical about bowler Shane Warne in the offing. Meanwhile I can’t help thinking that our chief theatrical strikers are currently missing an open goal.