Dear England, National Theatre review - extra time for stirring soccer classic

With qualifying about to begin for the soccer World Cup, and England sporting a brand new manager, it’s fitting that James Graham’s Olivier-winning celebration of the previous boss returns to the National. 

Unusually for a play, Dear England comes with a new ending, one that wraps up Gareth Southgate’s eight-year tenure, to now include the fourth major tournament in which his team competed – and the final near-miss in an accomplished, laudable, but for many frustrating period. 

I didn’t see the first iteration, but it appears that this fictionalised account of the Southgate years has lost none of its funny, perceptive, heart-warming appeal. You don’t need to be a soccer fan, let alone an England supporter familiar with these players and their chequered success, to appreciate Graham’s retelling of a quiet, gentle but quite radical reshaping of the English game – not its style of play, but its mentality and the culture around it.

In a manner of speaking, the production itself has a new manager and squad: Gwilym Lee takes the famous waistcoat from Joseph Fiennes as Southgate, with some new faces amongst the team and backroom staff. Liz White takes on the key role, from Gina McKee, of sports psychologist Pippa Grange, who was essential to Southgate’s work with his players. (Pictured below: Matt Bardock, Liz White and Gwilym Lee)Graham has always been fascinated by internal mechanics – of a political party (Labour of Love), Parliament (This House), the newspaper business (Ink). Here he’s targeted another world build around rules, precedent, assumptions, historical and psychological baggage, largely dictated by men. And, through Southgate’s thoughtful critique, he lays out the problem for English football: an expectation of success that feels like entitlement, which has become an albatross around the neck of generations of young players ill-equipped for the pressure of representing their country

As a player himself, Southgate epitomises the torment and trauma experienced by footballers, as well as the narrative of perennial failure that plagues English football. The play opens in 1996, with a lone player on stage, Southgate, kicking an invisible ball (the play does wonders without leather): this is the infamous penalty miss that cost the team a place in that years’ European Championship final. (I was there, it was heartbreaking.)

Back then, Southgate received no comfort, support or guidance in overcoming the stigma that rained down upon him. When he becomes manager, in 2016, he wants to change the culture that both left him adrift as an individual, and had led so many talented teams to failure since England’s one and only World Cup victory in 1966. 

But first, Graham and director Rupert Goold make hay in caricaturing the array of failed managers who come before Southgate, the media circus that surrounds the team, and the crusty old men steering the England set-up. This is the breezy, sharp-witted, character-driven comedy that will infuse much of the show. 

The board want Southgate to just keep things ticking over; but he has other ideas, hiring Pippa Grange to help him work on the psychology of the players, in particular to instil some self-belief. He wants these mostly inarticulate young men to start speaking to each other, share their feelings, become a team; and he wants them to put aside the enormous expectation, to eradicate their fear. There’s resistance, of course, from both his backroom staff and some of the players, but slowly his methods take hold. The penalty kick becomes the totem of both Southgate’s approach and the play itself. Until now, England has never won a penalty shoot-out. As the team analyse the problems – the lack of eye contact and team spirit, the rushed kicks, one deftly describes England as the “premature ejaculators of penalties”. It’s a massive, collective mental block; and, despite his protestations to the contrary, Pippa tells Southgate that even he, still, “can’t leave the spot” that defined him.

The play dramatises and visualises the team’s efforts to overcome this block with a magnificent aplomb that is indicative of their approach to the seemingly impossible task of replicating soccer on stage. Hats off to a production team that includes designer Es Devlin, movement directors Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf, and video designer Ash J Woodward, among others. 

Devlin’s set is comprised of two shining circles, one on the stage floor, one hanging above at an angle, which give a sense of a stadium enclosing the characters; revolving dressing room lockers, from which characters sometimes jump onstage, create dynamism and scene transitions. Video shows actual moments in the tournaments being played out in the story (two World Cups, two Euros), while the actors run and kick and huddle, displaying the joy or despair of the matches, creating wonderfully engaging vignettes of sporting action. 

Gwilym Lee makes a fantastic Southgate: he looks and sounds eerily like the manager, and captures that perplexed, rabbit-in-headlights demeanour, the ticks of discomfort with the limelight, as well as the thoughtful, articulate sincerity; when he says “I want to get people smiling again”, you know he means it. But Lee, and Graham, also reveal the wobble in Southgate’s own gameplan, when actual victory seems possible. 

The stand-outs among the players, all hilarious, are the returning Ryan Whittle as the tongue-tied (yet somehow inspiring) Harry Kane and Josh Barrow as the bundle of northern, cocksure energy that is goalkeeper Jordan Pickford, as well as newcomer Gamba Cole as Raheem Sterling, at first one of the most vocal naysayers of the manager’s approach. (Pictured above, Josh Barrow with ensemble)

While Graham is right to introduce Brexit as an important context for Southgate’s attempt to remove national stereotypes from his team’s narrative and combat the racism of the fans, this time the caricatures – of Theresa May and Boris Johnson – don’t work, feeling too slapdash. Arguably, this more serious aspect of the play could have been bolstered, rather than adding yet another championship; there is a slight feeling of diminishing returns as the play enters its now final stage. 

That said, it does allow a fictionalised version of new manager Thomas Tuchel to voice a eulogy to Southgate, which appears to reflect Graham’s own feelings. And it neatly presages a final, audience participatory singalong to Sweet Caroline, the anthem of the Southgate regime, which soars to the rafters. 

• Dear England at Olivier Theatre until 24 May. Then at Lowry, Salford, 29 May - 29 June, and on UK tour from 15 September
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk