In 1986, the England cricketer Ian Botham was suspended for 63 days after admitting to smoking marijuana. It might not sound like much now, but back then the story was huge: Botham, or “Beefy” as he was known, was England’s most high-profile sports star, and we were a lot more puritanical about pot in those days.
Some newspapers had called for a lifetime ban. So it felt like everyone was watching when Botham made his return against New Zealand. The day started quietly enough, but after half an hour, Botham was brought on to bowl. He charged in, his lion’s mane flapping, and his first delivery caught the edge of the Kiwi opener’s bat. It was caught! Botham had tied the world record for all-time Test wickets. “Blimey Beef,” said his teammate Graham Gooch. “Who writes your scripts?” Gooch was right: it was a ridiculously stagey comeback. Had that scene featured in a work of fiction, it would have looked unearned. We expect our protagonists to struggle and suffer a little more than that. And the truth is that sport routinely creates drama that could never translate to the page or the screen. That’s why sports movies are often so terrible and cliched: films either end with the underdog winning or losing pluckily (while learning an important life lesson). Dramatised re-enactments of sport just can’t compete with the real thing.
All of which makes the response to Dear England, a new play about Gareth Southgate and the England football team at the National Theatre in London, unexpected. Critics agreed that it is actually pretty good: there were a couple of five-star raves and lots of football-ese puns about it “hitting the back of the net” and scoring “a winner”. So, do we finally have a sports drama that isn’t a hackneyed mess?
Dear England is the creation of James Graham, a writer for stage and TV who is often drawn to political subject matter, such as This House, on the role of whips in the House of Commons, and the Channel 4 film, Brexit: The Uncivil War, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Dominic Cummings. In the promotion for Dear England, Graham said he was interested in Southgate as a character because he discerned in him a “Shakespearean” energy.
It’s easy to snicker at the comparison. Southgate, played by Joseph Fiennes, has shown himself to be thoughtful, decent and a hero to purveyors of waistcoats, but he’s no Richard III. Graham, though, was serious. “Shakespearean protagonists have huge objectives,” he told Esquire. “They want to be King of Scotland; they want to find love; they want to be the richest, most powerful people. What he’s doing on a personal level, but also national, is Shakespearean: he’s trying to retrieve the grail and bring it back.”
It is this ambition, to really interrogate and penetrate the psyche of those engaged in sport, that is absent in all the god-awful sports movies. It is there, too, in AppleTV+’s Ted Lasso, which started as a regulation sports comedy, but went to unexpectedly profound places over three seasons. It is also present in the hugely popular Netflix documentaries that have gone behind the scenes of Formula One (Drive to Survive), tennis (Break Point) and now cycling (Tour de France: Unchained). These series often don’t have access to the top competitors , but instead tell smaller stories that are not as binary as simply winning or losing.
For all these successes, dramatisations of sport still have a problem. We know Southgate’s England don’t claim the grail. Ted Lasso ended, perhaps predictably, with the underdog learning some fuzzy life lessons. Meanwhile, over in Edgbaston last week, England and Australia played out an epic, tempestuous first Ashes Test. Over five days, the advantage ebbed and flowed, culminating in a final hour that was almost unwatchably tense. At the end, Australia victorious, it was tempting to ask, “Who wrote this script?” But the answer, of course, was that no one could.
