Sportspeople hold a unique place among the pantheon of contemporary household names.  It is difficult to imagine with today's overpaid and overexposed nouveau riche starlets but there was a time when a sportsperson could embody the very spirit of the nation.  In 1936, a 22 year old Joe Louis was knocked out in round twelve against the German Max Schmeling, hero to the emerging National Socialist regime and Aryan poster boy.  At that point Louis was still an undefeated challenger (in fact he would only be knocked down two further times in a career lasting another fifteen years).

Louis symbolised the liberated negro to the US at the time.  His sober, embattling style of boxing was an antithesis between the flamboyance of Jack Johnson (who became the first African American heavyweight champion in 1908) and Muhammed Ali of the 1970s.  His family were hit hard by the Great Depression and Louis grew up in near poverty.  The son of emancipated slaves, he suffered from a speech impediment, his father was committed to a mental institution and the family were routinely ambushed by the Ku Klux Klan.

Louis's hard-working, clean-living and generous style led to a softening in the mass media of his ethnic background and, at the time of the Schmeling fight, was the personification of a nation modestly picking itself up after the nationwide recession.

The USA has always been a strong boxing country, the embattled fighter representing the American Dream.  The Schmeling fight was seen as an anomaly and a great upset.  In 1938, one year to the day that Louis became heavyweight champion and with war looming, he fought in a rematch with Schmeling.  The fight was said to have the largest single audience for a radio broadcast with an estimated audience of seventy million.  There would be no stopping Louis, and Schmeling was knocked out three times - the last for good - in the first round.  With Hitler's armies marching into Austria only months previously, Louis was the American omen.

He died in 1981 a pauper.  I don't have the space to tell you about his career or his multiple affairs with stars including Lana Turner and Lena Horne, his war days or how and why his funeral was paid for, anonymously at the time, by Frank Sinatra.  Truly, both a direct symbol and enigma.  Historian Randy Roberts has fashioned from this rags to riches to rags story something truly memorable, and a fitting piece for a great man.

Joe Louis: Hard Times Man by Randy Roberts (2010) is published in the UK by Yale University Press.

What can you say about a composer, musician, multi-instrumentalist, civil rights campaigner, human rights activist and politician?  Inspirational seems a little inadequate but is right on the money to describe FELA!, recently opened at London's National Theatre, having transferred from Broadway with three Tony Awards, an Obie for our devoted lead, and rave reviews, including one from the New York Times' Ben Brantley proudly proclaiming that "There has never been anything like this."

Which may or may not be true.  Hair, recently closed after a West End revival had Sixties audiences dancing in the aisles (calm down, it was part of the plot) had similar superlatives thrown at it - but that is not to deny that FELA! is a magical musical experience.

Fela Kuti lived a colourful life, made music that shook the world and a political activism that resulted in his very own communal compound within Nigeria called Kalakuta Republic.  There is his arrest, persecution, the murder of his mother by soldiers in a midnight raid and dancing - lots and lots of dancing.  Fela, played extraordinarily by Sahr Ngaujah who also sings, dances and plays the trumpet and saxophone, has a charisma that it is near impossible to shake yourself from, especially with an Afrobeat soundtrack that is as visually and aurally affective as it is infectious.

This is a musical revolution, an onslaught that breaks traditional barriers between the stage and audience.  Turner Prize and Cannes-winner Steve McQueen is following up his debut feature Hunger with a big-screen adaptation of FELA! for release next year.  I find it very difficult to find a true definition of the word 'sensational', but I know it when I see it and this is it.

FELA! opened at the National Theatre, London, on 17 November and will be broadcast live to selected cinemas nationwide on 13 January 2011.

Because it's Arthur Miller at the Tricycle - What more do you need?  It can be reasonably argued that the former Mr. Marilyn Monroe is America's greatest playwright, not only for the direct and deceptively simple manner in which he sets the theme of his plays but predominantly being able to deliver complex, worldly scenarios that also act as 'state of the nation'-style addresses.

First performed in 1994, Broken Glass is one of Miller's later plays and it follows in a lineage established by the classic plays that made his reputation, including All My Sons, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, in that a series of personal relationships are explored among the backdrop of a communal social atrocity.  In this instance our protagonists Philip and Sylvia Gellburg are a married Jewish couple living in New York in the years preceding the Second World War.  Their lives, seemingly inexplicably, are disturbed when Sylvia becomes paralysed after reading of Kristallnacht, the two day series of anti-semitic attacks in Nazi Germany, 1938.

The Tricycle Theatre are renowned for staging drama with a strongly political slant, just in the last few years they have shown plays such as Deep Cut, on the mysterious death of four army trainees in the titular Surrey barracks between 1995-2002; The Great Game, a three-part series of twelve newly commissioned plays on the theme of Afghanistan; and Bloody Sunday - Scenes from the Saville Inquiry, one of the theatre's original 'Tribunal' plays, dramatic reconstructions based on public inquiries.

Playing on the themes of the physical and mental experiences that fear and terror has on individuals, Broken Glass is very much an historical piece but one that has a contemporary relevance.  Terror, and the notion that specific communities are specifically targeting members of other communities in combined attack is common motif in most (if not all) editorial-led news programming.  It would be difficult to detach Arthur Miller from his left-wing principles, and the subject matter here is dark.  Admittedly, it would be a mistake to enter an Arthur Miller play expecting to be taken on a journey of wonderment and self-discovery but his is a world of the intricate intimacies upon which relationships are built; it's metaphor, sign and symbol.  His is the interpretation and representation of the raw humanity of people in the most difficult of circumstances - it has been argued that this in itself should be the fundamental role of the playwright.  Miller's standing in the history of twentieth century drama stands testament.

Broken Glass is at The Tricycle Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road, London NW6 7JR between 30 September - 27 November.

photo: Tristram Kenton, courtesy of Tricycle Theatre