By Alexander Stone
Sport and theatre share a fundamental ambition: to hold an audience in thrall. The stadium and the auditorium both demand suspension of disbelief, both thrive on collective emotion, and both produce narratives that can feel mythic in scale. Yet translating sporting legends to the stage has always been a fraught endeavour. How do you capture the kinetic energy of a football match within the confines of a proscenium arch? How do you reconcile hagiography with dramatic truth? Recent productions – from Liverpool’s Red or Dead to Leeds’s Through It All Together – suggest that British theatre is finding new ways to answer these questions, even as they expose the enduring difficulties of the task.
The Challenge of the Pitch
Sport generates stories of extraordinary power. The underdog’s triumph, the athlete’s decline, the manager’s obsessive pursuit of perfection – these are the stuff of classical drama. But sport’s power lies in its physicality, its unpredictability, and its communal resonance. A goal scored in the dying minutes of a cup final produces a collective euphoria that theatre can only approximate. To translate that experience to the stage requires not imitation but transformation: finding theatrical equivalents for the sensations of the pitch.
David Peace understood this when he wrote Red or Dead, his 700-page novel about Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of Liverpool FC. Peace’s prose is relentless, accumulative, almost incantatory – a stylistic choice that mirrors the repetitive, obsessive nature of Shankly’s leadership. When Phillip Breen adapted the novel for Liverpool’s Royal Court theatre in 2025, he faced the problem of how to render that intensity theatrical. His solution was bold: a cast of 52, including a community chorus of 40, filling the stage in a near-continuous whirl of movement, song, and story.
Red or Dead: The Kop on Stage
The production, which ran from March to April 2025, starred Peter Mullan as Shankly – a casting coup that gained resonance from Mullan’s own association with socialist politics. In a fittingly unshowy performance, Mullan captured Shankly’s gruff warmth, his no-nonsense patter, and his capacity for both assertion and whisper. The actor’s stillness amid the surrounding whirl gave the production its emotional centre.
Breen’s adaptation was, as The Guardian critic Chris Wiegand noted, “both inspired and inspiring, told with the quick humour, community spirit and full force of the Kop.” The production’s use of song – particularly You’ll Never Walk Alone, the Liverpool FC anthem – blurred the line between performance and ritual. Audience members joined the cast in singing, creating a communal experience that approximated the atmosphere of Anfield. Allison McKenzie, as Shankly’s wife Ness, provided equally fine vocals, reciting the poetry of Robert Burns and anchoring the production’s emotional core.
Yet Red or Dead also illustrated the difficulties of adapting sprawling, fact-based narratives for the stage. The production ran to two-and-a-half hours and struggled, at times, to find a theatrical rhythm. The novel’s repetitive, accumulative structure, so effective on the page, could feel on stage like a chronological recitation of achievements rather than a dramatic arc. Breen’s decision to have multiple narrative voices step out from within the cast was clever, but it could not entirely overcome the structural challenge inherent in adapting a novel that resists conventional dramaturgy.
Through It All Together: Bielsa and the Art of Belief
If Red or Dead tackled the challenge of a towering sporting icon, Through It All Together – premiered at Leeds Playhouse in June 2025 – approached the subject from a different angle. Written by Chris O’Connor and directed by James Brining, the play is a love letter to Marcelo Bielsa, the Argentine manager who led Leeds United back to the Premier League after a 16-year absence. But it is also a story about dementia, family, and the ways in which sport can provide meaning in the face of loss.
The play follows Howard and Sue, a fictional Yorkshire couple whose lives are intertwined with Leeds United’s fortunes. Howard is living with dementia, and the production handles his condition with delicacy and compassion, a sensitivity reflected in its inclusion of relaxed dementia-friendly performances. Bielsa, though never portrayed directly, looms over the production as a figure of almost spiritual significance. A stained-glass window mock-up of the manager greets audiences in the foyer, and his influence is felt in the play’s themes of belief, teamwork, and the transformative power of leadership.
Brining described Bielsa’s impact as something “beyond football”: “What he did was about reframing what a club could be in relation to its fans and its city.” This reframing is central to the play’s theatrical strategy. Rather than attempting to recreate the spectacle of a match, Through It All Together uses lighting, sound, and performance to evoke the emotional texture of fandom – the hope, the anxiety, the communal identity that football provides. The play captures the rise of content curators and social media, grounding the story in contemporary Leeds, but its heart remains the love shared between Howard and Sue, a love that persists even as their lives change.
The Theatrical Problem of Sport
Both productions highlight a broader challenge: sport resists theatrical representation. The physicality of athletic endeavour – the speed, the strength, the split-second decision-making – cannot be replicated on stage without either literal imitation (which often looks absurd) or symbolic abstraction (which can feel disconnected from the original experience). Successful sports dramas tend to sidestep this problem by focusing not on the act of sport itself but on its human consequences: the relationships, the obsessions, the sense of belonging.
This is why plays like The Damned United – adapted from Peace’s novel about Brian Clough and staged in Leeds and Derby in 2016 – work better than productions that attempt to recreate matches. The Damned United used a cast of 11 and human-sized Subbuteo-style mannequins, a device that acknowledged the artificiality of theatrical representation while still evoking the emotional stakes of football management. Similarly, Through It All Together avoids the trap of sport-as-spectacle by using Bielsa’s philosophy as a lens through which to explore larger themes of community and care.
Other recent productions have adopted similar strategies. Exe Men, a play about the rise of the Exeter Chiefs rugby union club, premiering at Exeter Northcott Theatre in October 2025, focuses on the personal sacrifices and local pride that drove the club’s improbable success. Written by Emmy award-winning screenwriter Ashley Pharoah, the play promises to celebrate the characters who made the impossible happen, using sport as a vehicle for regional identity and collective memory.
In Australia, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s 37 – named for Adam Goodes’ playing number – uses AFL football to explore relations between black and white Australia. The play, written by Nathan Maynard and directed by Isaac Drandic, is set during the era of Goodes’ war cry and uses the polarisation that followed as a lens for examining racism in its many forms. Goodes himself gave the production his blessing, and the play’s success – returning for a second run after a sold-out 2024 season – suggests that audiences are hungry for stories that use sport to illuminate social issues.
The Power of the Legend
What these productions share is a recognition that sporting legends are not merely athletes or managers; they are symbols. Bill Shankly represents socialism, community, and the dignity of work. Marcelo Bielsa represents belief, creativity, and the transformative power of leadership. Adam Goodes represents resistance, pride, and the struggle for justice. To stage these figures is to engage with the values they embody, not just the deeds they performed.
This is why the most compelling sports dramas transcend mere biography. They use the unique pressures and triumphs of the athletic world to illuminate universal human experiences. The theatre provides a unique crucible for examining these lives, offering audiences a different kind of engagement than watching archive footage or reading historical accounts – a chance to witness the legend wrestle with his humanity, right there before them.
The challenge, of course, is to avoid hagiography. Audiences can sense when a production is more celebration than drama, and the most memorable sports plays are those that allow their subjects to be complex, flawed, and fully human. Peter Mullan’s Shankly, for all his warmth, was also stubborn and obsessive; the Leeds couple in Through It All Together are navigating not just football fandom but the devastating reality of dementia. It is in these tensions – between public legend and private struggle, between communal identity and individual experience – that the most powerful theatre is made.
Looking Ahead
British theatre’s fascination with sport shows no signs of waning. Liverpool’s Royal Court has announced forthcoming productions including The Legend of Rooney’s Ring (about Wayne Rooney) and The Derby Days (a play for both Liverpool and Everton supporters). In Wales, a play about rugby legend John Bevan is touring venues in Monmouth and Abergavenny. And the success of productions like Red or Dead and Through It All Together suggests that audiences are eager for stories that bridge the gap between stadium and stage.
The task for playwrights and directors is to continue finding new ways to translate sport’s unique energy into theatrical terms. This means moving beyond chronology and hagiography, using the sporting context as a lens for exploring larger social and political themes, and trusting audiences to engage with complexity. Sport, at its best, is a form of collective storytelling. Theatre, at its best, does the same. The challenge – and the opportunity – is to make the two speak the same language.
Related Reading: The Rise of Community Theatre | Sport and Identity in British Culture
