If you had been passing the Royal Opera House on July 1 at around 7pm you would have witnessed a strange sight. A small group of largely middle-aged men were hovering outside the building with headphones clamped to their ears, unsure whether to go in and watch the Kirov Opera's Mazeppa. I know because I was one of them. The dilemma was that Dominic Cork and Darren Gough were slowly inching England towards an umbrella-chewing victory over the West Indies at Lords as the curtain was due to rise. If ever you wanted proof that sport can be as suspenseful as anything the stage has to offer, this was it.
Sport is theatre. What is striking, however, is how rarely theatre acknowledges sport. A couple of exceptions this week only proved the rule. The Beautiful Game, the new Lloyd Webber-Ben Elton musical, captures both the fluent rhythms and fanatacism associated with soccer. And the turning point in Julian Mitchell's Another Country comes when the flannelled hero despatches a love note to a junior boy while awaiting his turn to bat. But, on the whole, theatre and sport are rare bedfellows, which is odd when you think that drugs, race, sex and money dominate the back pages of our papers.
Obviously sport is hard to represent theatrically. But it offers a vivid social metaphor, as one or two dramatists have cannily realised. The best sporting play of recent years is David Storey's The Changing Room, in which you never actually see a ball kicked in anger. What Storey shows us are the rituals surrounding a Rugby League game: the daubing of frozen bodies in oils and embrocations, the injury to a fading, over-the-hill forward, the wan, post-match celebrations as these muscular heroes prepare to re-enter the outside world. But it is the visit by the club chairman, all banal encouragement and paunchy patronage, that characterises the play as a sharp example of sport as a metaphor for class.
That was 1971, and both life and Rugby League have radically changed since: only this week I read of the Leeds coach facing an industrial tribunal because one of his players had accused him of racial discrimination. But, although we are now into the age of Super Leagues and TV contracts, the game exerts a strong spell over northern dramatists. John Godber's most famous play remains Up'n'Under, in which he actually puts a Rugby League Sevens match on stage and shows an amateur pub team almost triumphing over their mighty Castleford opponents. The thrill comes not just from seeing sport in action but from Godber's ability to use Rugby League as a metaphor for male machismo.
But few dramatists have realised that sport is both central to our culture and an expression of our confusions about race, money, individualism and society. It is fun to list some of the exceptions. Soccer stars in Peter Terson's Zigger Zagger and David Farr's Elton John's Glasses, which had the misfortune to open at the height of the 1998 World Cup. Athletics is the subject of Louise Page's Golden Girls, which gives the lie to the idea that sport is a peculiarly male obsession. Cricket is the starting point for Richard Harris's Outside Edge, which explores the marital pain beyond the boundary: a play that Frank Keating wittily described as "Ayckbourn off a shorter run".
But Ayckbourn is the only modern British dramatist who has consistently realised sport's dramatic potential. He obviously relishes the technical challenge of playing theatrical games. More crucially, he understands that sport, even at its most humdrum level, is a revelation of character. In Time and Time Again, the under-achieving Leonard pinches a sports fanatic's girl while cluelessly fielding on the boundary. Tennis is brilliantly used in Joking Apart, where the effortlessly gifted Richard contrives to lose to his Swedish business partner by playing left-handed. "At least," cries the humiliated Sven, "you paid me the compliment of not hopping on one leg as well." And in A Game of Golf, part of the multiple-choice Intimate Exchanges, we are reminded that other things than balls sometimes get lost in a bunker.
Sport is central to Ayckbourn: in other dramatists, it has a more subterranean influence. Cricket is the abiding passion of all the best dramatists and subtly affects their work. Beckett, the only Nobel prize-winner to appear in Wisden, loved the game's formalised rituals. Pinter once spoke of cricket's "hidden violence" and in No Man's Land significantly names his characters after four pre-1914 legends. The most eloquent speech in Stoppard's The Real Thing comes when the writer-hero describes how, at its best, prose can fly in the same way as a ball off a bat. The one writer to have made cricket his sole subject was Rattigan in his none-too-brilliant film The Final Test: even given the English selectors' penchant for experience, it beggars belief to see the 58-year-old Jack Warner going out to face the Australian quickies on an Oval snorter.
When you tot it up, it sounds as if British drama is a steady procession of muddied oafs and flannelled fools, and I haven't even begun on American works such as Golden Boy (boxing), That Championship Season (basketball) or Damn Yankees (baseball). But the reality is that hardly any dramatist has woken up to the fact that professional sport is an all-too-accurate reflection of society at large. Sport, partly because of the Murdochisation of the media, is currently big business in Britain. That, in itself, introduces all kinds of new conflicts: between star performers and managers, between traditional values and the win-at-all-costs ethos, between natural achievement and drug-enhanced performance.
You can even argue that sport itself has become a dangerous national opiate used to distract us from the problems of the real world: Olympic medallists, in most papers, get more headlines than Yugoslav elections. You may hate sport. What you can't do is ignore it. Which is why, for all the virtues of Storey, Godber and Ayckbourn, one impatiently awaits a British play that recognises sport has passed way beyond a Saturday recreation or an enjoyable part of life and has become both a ruthless capitalist business and a source of dreams for a muddled, insecure nation.
• The Beautiful Game is at the Cambridge Theatre, London WC2 (020 7494 5080). Another Country is at the Arts Theatre, London WC2 (020 7836 3334).
