Tom McNab is a former Scottish triple-jump champion and British Olympic coach, turned technical director on Oscar-winning film 'Chariots of Fire' and sports novelist. So he has more than earned his audience for this play about the attempted boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. But it's overambitious, attempting to join the dots between Nazi Germany and America's Amateur Athletics Association, Leni Riefenstahl and Jesse Owens, in a relay of episodic scenes in which the dramatic torch passes unlit.
Then, as now, the rhetoric of the games was largely visual (as with this summer's London games, they even had a gigantic Olympic bell). But here, in both the dry wrangling of the American sports establishment and the curiously warm comedy of the Goebbels/Hitler double-act, dialogue dominates.
Nagged by the question of whether sport is above politics, McNab clearly understands ambition in all its guises. But '1936' never feels like more than an informative springboard for the panel talks that follow every performance.