Hope, hopelessness and heroism: why theatre is making a splash with sport

Will no one think of the playwrights? Defeat in Sunday’s Euros final stole the perfect ending from James Graham, who is currently updating his footballing hit Dear England for its return to the stage next year. Still, at least Gareth Southgate’s men didn’t go out in their quarter-final shootout against Switzerland. The possibility that an underwhelming campaign might be ended by penalties caused a flurry of texts between Graham and director Rupert Goold at the end of extra-time.

Sports are having a moment in the theatre. Red Pitch, like Dear England, used football to explore what it means to live in the UK today, exploring gentrification through the lives of three teenage hopefuls 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 pursued the project for six years. “It’s the most finely tuned play about capitalism that I’ve come across for a very long time – all the moral compromises that the characters make in the name of success.” Kate Attwell’s Testmatch was recently performed in the same space, interrogating racism and other colonial legacies through two cricket matches set 200 years apart.

This month, Hannah Kumari’s play about her teenage years as a Coventry City fan in the 90s, Eng-er-land, arrives at the King’s Head, London, for South Asian Heritage Month. Meanwhile, in Stewart Pringle’s The Bounds, at Newcastle’s Live theatre and London’s Royal Court, two football obsessives nervously await the outcome of a local derby – the twist being that the Northumberland pitch is miles wide, because this is the Shrovetide fixture of 1553. When a mysterious stranger shows up, the religious and political conflicts of the Reformation edge us from fan-based comedy into folk horror.

Pringle became intrigued by the long-running and often violent inter-village football games after a visit to the Tudor House in Margate, and on researching the historical background, discovered that the sport itself had become “a political football for the church and reforming forces within the country”. “That felt like it had a lot to say,” reflects Pringle, whose work premiered in Newcastle in June. “Particularly about the way in which the north of England has been buffeted by the winds of political change without a great deal of consideration.”

Sport’s atavistic affiliations are a useful proxy when grappling with issues of identity, whether geographical or social. Attwell describes it as a “volatile territory” full of “vehement patriotism and ancient feelings”. “It makes sense as a terrain for theatre artists to want to work in,” says the South African-born playwright, who also worked as associate director on the New York production of Red Speedo. “It provides 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 following, and Attwell admits that American audiences were unlikely to pick up on the “granular detail of the metaphor”. “But at the same time, there’s an almost Brechtian distancing that definitely resonated with American history. The legacy of slavery still has a huge impact in contemporary culture, so that was very much felt.”

Attwell wasn’t a cricket fan before she wrote the play – she just happened to catch a women’s T20 match on TV one day. American playwright Lucas Hnath, who wrote Red Speedo, also came to sport “like an alien visiting Earth”, particularly when he found himself baffled by the emotional response to the Balco scandal on doping in baseball.

“People were quite upset about it,” says Hnath, “but I didn’t really understand why it was a subject worth a congressional hearing. I was confused as to how doping was any less fair than any number of other performance-enhancing elements, like who can afford more training.” That question shaped a play he describes as “a thought experiment about how we draw the line between what is and isn’t fair”. “Sports is an arena in which it feels really black and white, and to challenge that is disturbing in a way that I don’t know that people are always 100% conscious of.”

Rajiv Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, has long understood the powerful and irrational feelings bound up in fandom. “The people of the city are fanatical about their sports teams and the entire mood is dependent on their performance,” says Joseph, whose basketball play King James debuted in Chicago in 2022. “Which explains why the mood of Cleveland has always been rather depressed.”

King James, which receives its UK premiere in Hampstead theatre in November, follows the friendship of two men during the dramatic career – and departure – of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ greatest every player. “In a small market like Cleveland, the presence of an athlete and a celebrity like LeBron James has an enormous economic impact,” says Joseph. “When he left, the loss was immense and he started to feel like a deity who would favour the land for a time and the crops would prosper … that’s how it feels to be a Cleveland fan.”

For the baseball-loving Pringle, longs-uffering fan of the Chicago Cubs, a first encounter with the terraces at Loftus Road gave him a new perspective on humanity. “When I said to my agent I want to write a play about 16th-century football, he said well you’ve got to start coming to some matches then, 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 kinship with the way in which the fans both loved and coruscated their team. It’s a combination of hope and hopelessness that’s really appealing … there’s something heroic and lovely and very human about that.”

Dunster can relate, having blocked out the dates of England’s games 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 tap into the global economy, we also rely on it to determine what kind of summer we’re having,” he says. “Euro 96 was the first time I can remember a sporting event changing what we felt like as a nation. And that feelgood, cool Britannia period, I think that’s what Dear England was tapping into.”

For some, the great appeal of sports-based drama is its ability to celebrate the underdog. Alongside Trevor Wood, Ed Waugh co-writes award-winning plays based on unsung athletes of the north-east, including miner turned rowing 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 1917-1918 season.

“Obviously it’s 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 to go back to the home and procreate again.”

For Waugh, plays about sport have an obvious appeal: they bring punters in. “We get people who have never come to the theatre before,” he says. “Not everybody likes football, but everybody knows about sport.” Pringle echoes that: the fact that his play had a football angle made it “hugely appealing” for Live theatre in Newcastle.

Dunster, an advocate of populist, commercial theatre, applauds plays like Wor Bella: “If we just make theatre about theatre, then you are shrinking your audience in a futile and existential way.” Ten years ago, he directed The Saints by Luke Barnes, at a pop-up theatre in Southampton that was created in the town centre en route between the pubs and the stadium, and served as an advertisement to fans of the very team the play was about. “It was built literally to capture a new audience.”

Red Speedo, with its text-heavy monologues, made commercial theatre producers “nervous”, says Dunster, one reason for the long gestation period of this production. 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 regime. Why the necessity? “The shape of a swimmer’s body is quite unique,” says Dunster, “and he’s in Speedos all the time.”

There’s more: Cole will also be waxed “from head to foot” by opening night, says the director. “His girlfriend has booked the place so that she can video him when he’s having it 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. Dear England is at the National Theatre, London, 10 March – 24 May 2025