New pitch for football

Football and the arts have never been particularly comfortable in each other's company. Until the arrival of the now-ubiquitous Nick Hornby and his taboo-breaking Fever Pitch, the audiences for football and theatre, or literature, were quite distinct.

Could football fans actually read? Did anyone believe Melvyn Bragg, when he claimed to cull as much enjoyment from an afternoon at Highbury as he did an evening at Covent Garden? This was a very English state of affairs, a dichotomy based largely on class.

This season, however - post Hornby, Three Lions and laddism - soccer arrives in the West End, in a neatly populist-yet-credible package. The Beautiful Game, a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton (better known as a novelist and comedian), is set in a footballing context against a backdrop of incipient violence in late-Sixties Belfast: two young and talented players struggle to fulfil "enormous promise" while their girlfriends dream of success and consequent escape. It is, says Elton, a love story rather than a song 'n' dance treatise on politics, or indeed football - which is just as well, since he and Lloyd Webber could hardly be described as political soulmates, nor footballing experts.

But if the origin and plot of The Beautiful Game sound a little bizarre, Lloyd Webber and Elton are only maintaining an English tradition: the history of novelistic and on-stage soccer isn't long, but it's decidedly odd.

Before football entered the mainstream of British culture the few novels written about the game came either from the inexperienced pens of players themselves, who loosely fictionalised their own careers, or from distinguished, but culturally maverick sportswriters like Brian Glanville.

Thus Jimmy Greaves's 1980 classic, The Ball Game, offered "more action between the goalposts and the bedposts as soccer superstar Jackie Groves scores in the States", according to its dust-jacket. Gary Lineker's forgotten effort, All in the Game, written with Stan Hey, featured a character named Darren Matthews, an archetypally nice guy who, yes, transferred to Barcelona and the Nou Camp; and best of all, Pele's 1990 novel, The World Cup Murder, took a far-fetched, futuristic plot (the blurb describes Pele as the "Dick Francis of the football thriller") and set it in America - far-fetched, that is, until Colombian defender Andres Escobar actually was murdered shortly after the 1994 US World Cup.

Translating football action to the stage, meanwhile, involves obviously insurmountable problems. Brian Glanville, whose first book, The Rise of Gerry Logan, saw great success on the Continent (German superstar Franz Beckenbauer described it as the finest football novel he'd ever read), but encountered "typically English" reaction here ("it was treated like a cup of cold piss," says Glanville), simply doesn't think you can ever make a "football play", or musical, work.

"The essence of what happens on the field is lost," he says. "Nothing you can do in visual terms can recreate it. It is almost by definition doomed from the start."

This hasn't stopped several playwrights - and composers and choreographers - having a go, though. Most "football plays" focus primarily on dressing-room action, on play-ers' families and off-pitch lives - and on the darker side of soccer tribalism. Perhaps the most successful was Peter Terson's 1967 play Zigger Zagger, named after a hooligan chant. In the late Sixties, Zigger Zagger caused a furore among the theatre critics, few of whom had ever entered a football stadium let alone jostled on the terraces.

London's largely middle-class theatre-goers were shocked by this revelation of "youths pitched out of school at 15, with or without dead-end jobs, their present excitement and future faith all turning on the (sic) football", according to Peter Seddon's meticulously researched A Football Compendium (which lists everything that's ever been published about football and much that hasn't). The theatre-going public was used to the odd football reference and understood what it meant: crudely, if characters talked about soccer, they were working class - Harold Pinter used football allusion brilliantly in The Dumb Waiter and A Night Out - but they'd never before had their noses pressed up against this horrifying world of soccer obsession and violence.