Hello. Welcome to GAME/SHOW.

My name is James and I’m a theatre director. I’m also a rabid football fan. My mate Tom is a sound designer. He’s also a football fan (if Arsenal count). Together we’ve made this podcast about our twin passions.

Over the years we have made many theatre shows together. On lunch breaks, dinner breaks and in the pub at the end of the night the conversation invariably turns to football. In every company we’ve ever been part of we’ve readily discovered fellow football fanatics amongst the ranks of actors, writers, designers and stage managers. It seems a lot of people who work in theatre also really like football. Maybe that’s the same in all walks of life… after all, a lot of people really like football.

But as we accumulated more and more football loving colleagues in theatres around the UK and around the world, we started noticing the similarities between football and theatre and the oddly obsessional nature of fandom for both. Once we noticed, we couldn’t stop noticing. The similarities were striking, and everywhere. Maybe lots of people loved football and theatre because in some ways they were… the same thing?

Ok, bear with me. On a very basic level they both have a stage, some people perform, people come to watch and applaud and sometimes boo. They are both narrative driven and feature characters who we adore or despise and want to win or lose. To be any good, they both require drama. Triumph and despair.

The cut and thrust of a great football match mirrors the vicissitudes of fortune in a great play and football reaches for theatrical terminology to articulate its own action… a dramatic late winner, the theatrics of a felled winger, the tragedy of a penalty shoot out, a plot twist, the narrative of a season, heroes and villains. The great dramatic characters share traits… flawed genius, narcissism, hubris: Macbeth and George Best.

And then there are all the overlaps in architecture, music, fashion, fan culture, the integral role theatres and football clubs play in their local communities. The similarities in the machinery of the respective industries and way their mirror our society. Perhaps most profoundly they are both about shared experience. Proof of our deep human need to commune; to be part of something bigger than ourselves; to join a congregation and witness a story unfolding before our eyes that inspires us, moves us, elates us and teaches us something about ourselves and our world. They are both art.

The more we noticed the similarities, the more fascinated we became. Of course theatre and football aren’t the same thing. But both are a huge part of many people’s lives. More than just jobs, hobbies, passing interests; these are deep rooted passions that define individuals, whole communities, national psyche. Public spectacles that draw huge crowds and reflect and refract and shape our lives and our society through their narratives.

As defining pillars of our culture, we think the comparison and connection and intersections and curious similitude is worthy of a bit of inquisitive investigation and analysis. Maybe even more people who like one would also like the other?

So we made GAME/SHOW. We hope you like the pilot episode which is out now. You can listen to it here. Let us know what you think.