Following the England football team's dismal performance in Spain last month, my dejected 10-year-old son turned to me. "Mum, what was it like when England won the World Cup?" he asked. In the spirit of Christmas charity, Battersea Arts Centre in south London has come to the rescue of all young people who might be tempted to think it's all over. This Christmas, the theatre is staging The World Cup Final 1966: the story, the build-up and, yes, excerpts from the legendary match itself.

Putting aside dark thoughts that the play might be the closest today's youth come to seeing an England side win the trophy, I sought out the co-writers, Tom Morris (Associate Director at the National Theatre) and Carl Heap (who also directs the show), to talk tactics.

The play is, says Morris, the third in a trilogy for BAC of "unstageable epics", the first two being Ben Hur and Jason and the Argonauts. Indeed, he adds, there are similarities between this story and that of Jason and the Argonauts: "A group of people has to be forged into a highly tuned team to go and win a golden trophy. It's about the rough and smooth [of that process]. You don't have to be a football maniac to watch this show, just as you didn't have to be a Greek scholar to watch Jason and the Argonauts."

Football fans, however, tend to be rather thicker on the ground than Greek scholars and fairly vociferous in their opinions. Were Morris and Heap anxious about making mistakes? "Yes!" they cry, in unison. "This year it's harder," says Morris, "because not only is there no single source material but some of the people you are writing about are still alive. There is an absolute plethora of intriguing historical detail that lots of people know and care about. And there's no correlation between the bits people remember and the bits you need to tell a story."

What's on stage then is a version of events: the story, as told by Morris and Heap. There are no lookalikes: indeed, Alf Ramsey is black and Geoff Hurst is female, which was not the case in 1966.

There is no footage of the real game, either. "Once you start, you might as well just show the video," says Heap. "So we don't even show clips: it's all live."

The cast, then, finds a theatrical language to represent the game, using music, dance, comedy and some - elementary - football moves. To suggest the aesthetic difference in playing style between Uruguay and England, for example, the English players deploy formal country-dance steps, while their opponents slide around them in slinky Latin American fashion. It is a good-humoured, infectiously daft approach that draws the audience into the story and even uses them to explain such mysteries as the 4-2-4 formation and the "Italian method".

But while the narrative outlines the build-up to the match, the show does touch on broader issues, such as player behaviour, class politics, and the way both the sport and society have evolved. "We're not trying to dramatise how football has changed," says Morris. "But there are things we hope that people might think about afterwards."

It is this opportunity for metaphor that perhaps makes sport such an attractive subject for dramatists. Indeed, The World Cup Final 1966 joins a body of sporting drama. There is not much on synchronised swimming, but certainly rugby, football, boxing, baseball, athletics and even table tennis have made the transition to the stage.

Sporting triumphs and tragedies do, as Morris pointed out, provide archetypal narratives. But sport can also allow the playwright to train a spotlight on human behaviour - particularly that of men. Where better than the football terrace or the locker room to examine machismo, male rivalry and male bonding? Simon Block's Not a Game for Boys even used a ping-pong tournament to describe friendship between men.

Sport stories also allow scrutiny of class tensions and racial inequality. Clifford Odets' Golden Boy, recently revived at Greenwich Theatre, explored the limited success open to a black boxer in 1960s America, while Roy Williams' Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, staged at the National Theatre last April, examined nationalism and racism against the backdrop of an England match.

But perhaps most intriguing for playwrights is the common ground between sport and drama: both live, physical performances relying on disciplined performers and committed spectators. In the early 1980s John Godber's Up'n'Under and Claire Luckham's Trafford Tanzi (in which Tanzi literally wrestles her way through life in search of liberation) used these parallels and built on a rise in popular, physical theatre to create accessible drama with sport as a metaphor. And implicit in such pieces is a response to the challenge that sport throws down.

It has been said that football is the new theatre, offering passion, drama and poetry, but on a scale only dreamed of in rehearsal rooms. Drama's retort is to recreate that physical intensity - and add meaning.

Carl Heap maintains that theatre looks "with huge envy" at the massive popularity of live sport. His reaction, however, is to try to kindle in his audience the same sense of involvement. The World Cup Final 1966 is a delightfully zany show, but it does catch you up in the quest for the trophy. It also cannily pinpoints that simple moment of fantasy when sport and drama meet. The celebrated final, recreated with a mop as a ball, will appeal to any child who has re-enacted a winning goal in the living room and any adult who has played cricket in the office with a rolled newspaper as a bat.

And, of course, theatre scores over football in that it offers a live repeat every night with a consistent happy outcome. At least, that is the theory. At one World Cup rehearsal, a German striker scored an extra goal. "If Germany wins [during a performance], we'll just have to go with it!" says Morris. 'The World Cup Final 1966', BAC, London, to Jan 15 2005.

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