“Tom McNab is a Renaissance Man, spanning sport and the arts in a unique manner,” declares the author’s programme biography, “and 1936 represents his work at its best.” I do hope not; it would be disheartening to think that the Munich, Montreal and Lake Placid summer and winter Olympic athletes whom he coached were as poorly served as the drama of his subject matter here.
    
1936 effectively ends in December 1935, with the vote of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States against boycotting the Berlin Olympics in protest at the Nazi regime’s treatment of Jews. McNab’s play is about the background to the XI Olympiad, not the Games themselves: about Hitler and Goebbels’ plans to create a showcase for Nazi Germany, and Leni Riefenstahl’s intention to document it as flatteringly as possible on film (each performance of the play is followed by a screening of extracts from Riefenstahl’s Olympia); and about the threatened boycott, as personified in American Olympian Avery Brundage – bought off by the promise of high title, it is bluntly claimed – and in prospective competitors Jewish German high jumper Gretel Bergmann and, of course, black American athlete Jesse Owens. The point is made, or rather orated in as many words, that the treatment of black Americans at the time was little or no better than that of German Jews (comparatively early in the Nazi era, admittedly).
    
McNab’s drama, however, is not an organic creation. It is spelled out, not only by the narrator-figure of American journalist William L. Shirer making matters as explicit as an unsubtle documentary voiceover, but also by virtually every character. The first scene (after a Shirer intro) shows German IOC member Theodore Lewald answering a telephone call for which he and his colleague have clearly been waiting; he nevertheless finds it essential to say in as many words, “That was Comte Henri de Baillet-Latour, the president of the International Olympic Committee. We’ve done it, Carl: the 1936 Olympic Games are coming to Berlin!” This more or less sets the standard for the remainder of the 80-minute play. McNab begins, perhaps inadvertently, to approach interesting territory in the matter of how the Olympic ideal may become compromised in dealing with more worldly ideologies. However, to all intents and purposes this is a history lecture poorly disguised as theatre.
     
Written for the Financial Times.