‘I want the audience to smell the sweat’: Chariots of Fire races onto the stage

At the Sheffield Crucible Theatre on a Wednesday afternoon before the election, a group of actors are running breathlessly around the perimeter of the stage. As one of them picks up speed, arms windmilling, a pulsing synthesiser beat fills the air, immediately recognisable to anyone who has watched Hugh Hudson’s 1981 film Chariots of Fire and, indeed, to many who haven’t, so completely has ­Van­gelis’s ­anth­emic theme embedded itself in the ­national consciousness. 

“Many people think they know what Chariots of Fire is, even if they’ve never seen it,” says ­Robert Hastie, the Crucible’s outgoing ­artistic ­director. “It’s only when you watch it, you realise – ‘Oh, there’s a bit more to this film than boys on a beach, running…’ ”

For the final production of his eight-year tenure at the Crucible, Hastie is staging an adaptation by Mike Bartlett (the writer of Doctor Foster and King Charles III) of Colin Welland’s Oscar-winning screenplay that hymned youthful determination and amateur prowess. Chariots of Fire is, of course, based on a true story: that of Eric Liddell and ­Harold Abrahams – one, a Scottish Christian missionary, who didn’t so much run as ecstatically hurl himself through the air; the other, a steely Jewish student at Cambridge – who both won gold for Britain at the 1924 Paris Olympics, in the 400-metre and 100-metre sprints respectively. 

Bartlett’s ­adaptation was first seen at the Hampstead Theatre (and later transferred to the West End) in 2012, while London was hosting the Games. The reason for reviving it now, as Team GB head across the Channel, dreaming of further glory in the City of Light on the centenary of Liddell and Abrahams’s historic triumph, is obvious. 

“Sport is designed to channel our feelings of national identity and pride towards something where victory feels like life or death,” says Hastie, sitting alongside Bartlett in the Crucible’s café during a break in rehearsals. “Which is great, because it isn’t life or death. Of course, the ugly side of that is football hooliganism. Fortunately, you don’t get much hooliganism with the Olympics.”

For many, the film belongs to a vanished era, one in which Cambridge dons speak solemnly about the sacrifices of the First World War generation and the purity of the amateur spirit, and where the camera lingers on dreamy shots of college quads and choirboys, not to mention a startlingly puppyish Nigel Havers practising in the grounds of his country pile, with champagne glasses balanced on the hurdles. How do Hastie and Bartlett think this portrait of a nation shaped by privilege and patriotism still speaks to us, exactly a century on from the events it depicts? 

“Of course the film pushes these patriotic buttons, but at other times it pulls the rug [from under us],” says Hastie. “One of the themes that sings really loudly is how the British establishment will embrace you when it’s useful to do so and reject you when it doesn’t suit. Both Liddell and Abrahams are outsiders.” He explains that the Scottish members of the cast refer to this as “the Andy Murray effect: you are British when you are winning and Scottish when you aren’t”.

As a playwright, Bartlett has made a career out of charting our national identity on stage, not least in King Charles III, his 2014 Olivier Award-winning speculative drama, and he tells me he is struck by the changes this country has gone through since his Chariots of Fire was first staged in 2012. “It now feels like a long time ago,” he says. “But I remember walking down Shaftesbury Avenue: there was bunting, the sun was shining – it was like one of those post-war pictures of London. Now it feels as though 2012 has become a byword for the last moment of British pride.”

Yet haven’t we, as a nation, always tussled with ideas of identity and nationhood? “Yes, I think we probably have. There is something in our national psyche, which is that, as a nation, we are in fact very uncertain, and we clearly have been for a long time.”

If Chariots of Fire is about our ­tortured relationship with Englishness, it’s also about the sheer primal joy of running. But how can you capture the singular thrill of an Olympic sprint on an eight-metre (26ft) stage? “The more impossible something sounds, the more I want to do it,” says Hastie, who during his time at the Crucible has specialised in large-scale musical spectaculars that seemed to use every inch of the theatre’s vast interior. “But I also want to show something you don’t get on film. I want the audience to smell the sweat on the actors and hopefully feel the wind on their faces.”

He is reluctant to give away exactly how he will achieve this, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the Crucible stage has a double revolve, and there are the many aisles running through the ­amphitheatre-style auditorium – not to mention the rank of treadmills in the rehearsal studios. Such is the production’s commitment to physical authenticity that there is a physiotherapist on hand for the actors and hour-long warm-up ­sessions before every rehearsal, and although the cast are not quite at the stage where they require ice packs, one actor has already reported the emergence of muscles they didn’t previously have.

These days, we think nothing of athletes using every latest tech­nical, scientific and psychological innovation in pursuit of even the slightest competitive advantage. Yet in the film, Abrahams’s decision to hire a professional coach horrifies the crusty Cambridge dons – played on screen with delicious sniffiness by John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson. In a modern world where sport is increasingly governed by money, have we lost sight of the romance of the amateur? Hastie thinks not. “Harold says to the dons, ‘You want success but with the effortlessness of the gods,’” he reminds me. 

“But the flipside of that kind of glorification of the amateur is a sort of arrogant, entitled dilettantism, which knows how to talk the talk, because it’s a class-based inheritance. In that respect, Harold is the voice of the future. One of the triumphs of Gareth Southgate’s England team – up to this point, at any rate! – is that it’s forced the establishment to reckon with the achievement of players who have put in years of hard work. On one level the film tries to dismantle the romantic idea that natural beauty and grace is superior to discipline and dedication and an application of craft.”

Bartlett agrees, “That discussion is why the story works so well. Because don’t we all feel [that ­tension] when we watch sport? Sometimes we go, ‘Oh, this is really commercial.’ Or we go, ‘We’re England, so we should be able to turn up on the day and be brilliant.’ But we also want our players to work for victory. The story turns those things over without giving you the answer.”

Ultimately, Bartlett – who admits that, when at school, he would hide behind the cricket hut during cross-country in PE, only emerging to join his classmates for the final few yards – sees the film’s pellucid scenes of boys running by the sea as an exquisite metaphor. “For me, it’s about how, after the horrific First World War, a generation started to find a way to rebuild Britain and throw off some of those old ideas and construct a more complicated country that includes more identities and different beliefs,” he says. “And that feels true all over again in 2024. If there is an answer in the story, then it’s in the running, and all the humanity and the freedom that comes with it.” Whether or not you agree, the chances are you’ll leave the theatre inspired to lace up your trainers and go for a run, Vangelis in your earbuds, of course.

Chariots of Fire is at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield (sheffieldtheatres.co.uk), Thurs-July 27