1966 World Cup Final
BAC, London

Dolan Cummings

First of all, I should have scored, and nearly did, but one of the problems with taking part in a interactive piece of theatre is that you're never sure what exactly you're supposed to be doing and how much freedom you have, so I'd played the ball to the feet of a defender before I even figured out what was happening. Not that I'm bitter.

World Cup Final 1966 is the third of Carl Heap's and Tom Morris' unlikely but innovative Christmas shows at BAC, which began in 2002 with Ben Hur and continued last year with Jason and the Argonauts. A show about England's legendary World Cup win may seem like a bit of a departure, but in the event it has all the ingredients required for the epic storytelling that has become their trademark. (And if it still doesn't seem Christmassy, think Escape to Victory.)

Everybody knows that England won the cup (sorry if you didn't), but many of the details will be new to non-anoraks. The backgrounding, going back to Alf Ramsey vowing to reclaim England's honour after their defeat by the USA in the 1950 World Cup, and the response of the young Charlton boys back home, successfully conveys the cultural and historical context. And the 1966 campaign is neatly recreated with some good-natured national stereotyping and a great deal of prancing around with mops.

For me, rather too much is made of the ability of BAC-style theatre to tell epic stories in a small space and with few props. After all, you could just have somebody sitting in an armchair and reading something. The challenge Heap and Morris set themselves is rather to make full use of the resources available to tell the story in a truly theatrical way. Indeed, in World Cup Final 1966, they gleefully use not no props, but the wrong props. By using an apparently totally inappropriate set, they show that it is imagination and resourcefulness, rather than theatrical equipment, that makes theatre what it is.

The production's use of the audience is particularly striking. Arguably, the audience is one of theatre's great underexploited resources, but World Cup Final 1966 makes use of everything including our hair and teeth. The audience is not just the crowd for the matches: we sing, we shout, we volunteer to demonstrate football formations, and some of us do press-ups. And we have to admire the subtle means by which we are encouraged to get into the spirit of things against our better natures.

What's really interesting about the interactivity, though, is that the production becomes part of the performance. It is as if we are all just a bunch of people in a room together, making things up on the hoof. This is an illusion, of course: the whole thing has been carefully written and directed by Heap and Morris, and it is on their terms that the audience takes part, but nonetheless the sense prevails that we are all in this together.

It is a particular type of theatre done very well, but it points to much wider possibilities. As a Christmas show, World Cup Final 1966 is of course designed to appeal to kids, but its resists categorisation as a kids' show. By the same token, 'new audiences' are as likely to love or hate this sort of thing as the traditional theatre audience: it cuts across that type of divide. The production is brimming with ideas that might work in a multitude of other contexts, and as such it can be appreciated on a variety of levels. The important thing, though, is to keep a cool head, pick your spot, and shoot as soon as you get close enough to the ball.

Till 15 January 2005