Theatre Sports Clash

Booking tickets for the Olympic Games is currently harder than talking to someone on the phone in a West End box office to discuss the best or cheapest seats in the stalls. You’re better off, in both cases, taking a chance on-line and possibly finding yourself lumbered.

But things go from bad to worse with the Olympics. Having already cowed the West End into announcing closures for the two-week duration in August, their own ticket re-sale programme has ground to a halt, with the service suspended. Today, for instance, you can only take a punt on tickets for the football or the paralympics, the events with disabled athletes that follow the Olympics proper.

Having said that, I have many friends and neighbours who have already acquired tickets, and I’m slightly jealous, though I’m still harbouring vague hopes of getting in to see some of the motorcross rallying at Hadleigh Castle overlooking the estuary at Leigh-on-Sea.

I was born in the summer of the last Olympics in London, a sweltering hot one by all accounts, and the legend of the Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen, “the flying housewife,” who won four gold medals, is still part of my childhood memory.

Some of this year’s Cultural Olympiad is more appealing than the games themselves — the Pina Bausch retrospective, the Shakespeare bonanza, Cate Blanchett, the opening ceremony for which Stephen Daldry and Danny Boyle have been given a budget of £42m to play with: what on earth will they do? Will there be dancing and popular song, or something terrible like Michael McIntyre and a galaxy of X Factor winners? Fireworks? Balloons? 

One fringe theatre show — well, it’s coming into the Arts after a whistle-stop national tour in June and July — is already whetting my appetite, if only because the Press release from Paul Sullivan is the funniest so far this year.

Our old friends, the Reduced Shakespeare Company, are presenting The Complete World of Sports (abridged), aiming to showcase every sport ever played on every continent in the entire history of the world in under two hours.

Well, they had to think of something different after skewering Shakespeare for all those years in ninety minutes, and I guess a potted Dickens cabaret in this centenary year might sound a little obvious and tired after the overkill we’ve already endured in the first month.

The RSC (not) show sets out to answer such great questions of our time as: Is darts really a sport? Which is more boring — baseball or cricket? Who invented wife-carrying, bog-snorkelling and cheese-rolling? And why aren’t these sports in the Olympics?

Perhaps our cultural commissar, Ruth Mackenzie, has missed a trick in not arranging an official theatrical sports programme including such plays as John Godber‘s Up ‘n’ Under, Ben Travers‘ A Bit of a Test, Peter Terson‘s Zigger Zagger and David Storey‘s The Changing Room.

And there could have been a parallel film season featuring The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Bend It Like Beckham, Moneyball and Senna — that last documentary film, about the life and death of the brilliant Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna, is the best and most exciting sports film I’ve ever seen, chiefly because it reveals the single-minded steel and artistry of the true natural champion.

It seems likely that getting around London will be a nightmare during the Olympics fortnight, which makes this year’s Edinburgh Festival an even more attractive proposition than usual — with the added bonus of a chance to watch the Games on television at a safe distance of 400 miles.

And I notice that the Edinburgh International Festival is creeping ever closer into the fabled “week zero” of the Fringe, with the opening concert now scheduled for Thursday 9 August; last year it was on the Friday, before that, always the Saturday… before we know where we are, the Traverse Press weekend will be clashing with Dutch dance companies at the Playhouse, and a very good thing, too.