9/17/2023 0 Comments Footlight club 2016![]() ![]() Richard Wilson in rehearsals for The Nap. We all know that films about football are usually terrible because you want to show that wonderful all-conquering Leeds United, and you get some fat bloke from some agency to play Billy Bremner. It was his director Richard Wilson who suggested a play about snooker that opened with the set of the final of the World Snooker Championship, its green baize tables set up in the very space where they are really used. There are whole areas of the play that are gibberish if you don’t know anything about football, but that was the only play I was able to write at the time.”īean also hesitated, but for a slightly different reason. I knew that I was limiting my audience with every page I wrote. “I had the idea for The Red Lion with a slightly heavy heart because I thought I would be writing a play without women in it, and one that really is about men in a particularly male environment. Marber says he shied away from the subject initially. Both The Red Lion and the musical Bend It Like Beckham seemed to slightly underperform at the box office, because football was as off-putting to some as it was enticing to others. There are some indications that this assumption is untrue. If you love football, so the logic goes, perhaps you might try a play about the beautiful game with Shakespearean implications rather than one about an ancient king by the playwright himself. ![]() Multi-channel TV and the internet mean it is possible to follow not only major sporting events, but even the most minor ones, streamed to a screen near you at any time of the day and night.įor theatres, wanting to attract a different kind of audience, the cultural weight given to sport makes it seem like a golden opportunity. Dilwyn Porter, father of playwright Phil, and a professor of sports history and culture at De Montfort University, says its ubiquity makes it “the wallpaper of our lives.” It’s always on in the corner of the pub, and discussed obsessively online and in the papers. Of course, there have always been plays about sport – David Storey’s The Changing Room, written in 1971, being both the perfect example and a template for many works that followed.īut this feels like something else – an indication that sport in all its multifarious forms has become so dominant that it is impossible to avoid. ![]() Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianĪll of this, and the fact that Patrick Marber’s The Red Lion, a play set in the dressing room of a non-league football club, is still a recent memory, indicates that there is something in the air that has turned sport into a fertile terrain for drama. Peter Wight, Daniel Mays and Calvin Demba in The Red Lion by Patrick Marber at Dorfman, National Theatre. This hits the stage just as another cycling play, Beryl, by the writer and actor Maxine Peake, produced in association with the West Yorkshire Playhouse, has its London premiere, while, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse itself, The Damned United, adapted from David Peace’s book about Brian Clough’s chaotic 44 days in charge of Leeds United, is unveiled. Rehearsals were taking place in the Jerwood Space in London, where, in the room next door, work was under way on Phil Porter’s The Man With the Hammer, another sporting drama – this time about cycling – which is about to open at the Theatre Royal Plymouth. It was the playwright Richard Bean who quoted Mamet’s essay when we were talking about The Nap, his new play about snooker, which will be performed in the Sheffield Crucible, the home of that sport. And the basic sense that there is an instructive and energising synergy between the two is, by chance, being tested in theatres up and down the UK. There is many an England cricket, football or rugby fan, too accustomed to disappointment, who would happily settle for a one-sided victory rather than unsettling uncertainty.īut the arts aficionado who loves sport searches for the parallels between drama on the field and pitch and that unfolding on a stage. The true sports lover might beg to differ. ![]()
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