Theatre loves losers. Shakespeare is full of shambolic failure. I can’t think of one Chekhov character I’d like to go to the pub with. So, I suppose the trials and tribulations of the England national football team under Gareth Southgate are a perfect subject for onstage examination. Let us tell sad stories of the death of the England squads’ hopes of winning a trophy.
The original run scored a back-of-the-net hit in 2023 earning a West End transfer festooned with awards. Now Dear England returns to the National Theatre, on the first leg of a nation-wide tour. But the mood feels different. Back then the 2024 German Euros were on the horizon, still rose-tinted by the same Sisyphean hope by us England fans. This time fans were at least able to glimpse the silverware — tantalisingly so, before England lost in the final. Naturally. Only last week did newly anointed Thomas Tuchel step up to the plate as England manager for his first game: the dream of a Southgate trophy for the England team will remain just that.
There’s a deeper contemporary resonance, too. Moral panic over young men and the contagion of toxic masculinity is rollicking through Mumsnet forums and newspaper columns in the wake of Netflix’s overly-pondered Adolescence which stormed screens with a finger wagging warning the incels peril.
“The problem is up here,” explains newly anointed Southgate tapping the side of his temple. That’s his diagnosis for England’s humiliating defeat against Iceland in 2016 after years of poor tournament performances despite boasting some of the world’s highest paid players. Taking the reins, Southgate incorporates psychologist Pippa Grange into training sessions. Rowdy twenty-somethings are handed journals, all to the chagrin of the “perform or piss off” school of thought that the grizzled England team physio defends.
It culminates in the penalty kick — deceptively simple, disarmingly terrorising. Then there’s the added impossibility of carrying the agony and the ecstasy of a nation on their shoulders, something Southgate knows only too well. The question becomes not how to win, but how to lose.
It thrives on the dramatic level, courtesy of Southgate’s pre-fab redemption arc. Once only known for missing a penalty, now a reluctant hero not just redefining his legacy but also the legacy of the team he has stepped up to manage. He’s not quite Hamlet, but there is something Shakespearean about his unassuming heroism. Greatness thrust upon him? Well, he certainly never achieved greatness.
But playwright James Graham wants to push deeper and mould Dear England into a state of the nation meditation on what it means to be English. Obvious from the title, I suppose. Credit where it is due, it’s a brilliant trick of symbolic gerrymandering, sending your head spinning with digging for depth behind the pageantry and pomp of England matches, in Graham’s eyes a litmus test for national consciousness.
The team becomes a microcosm of wider national politics having to traverse racism and masculinity. The National Theatre lives up to its name. It’s especially welcome after the other political duds to flop through the Olivier stage under Rufus Norris’s tenure as artistic director.
The tournament sequences ebb and flow with electricity
But as crunchy as politics is, it’s also where Dear England crumbles under the weight of its own heavy-handedness. Do I believe that the real England team would sit around a flag draped on the floor discussing what it means to be English? I don’t think the kid sitting in front of me did either. His head was tilted, presumably for an aptly timed power nap, through the slightly nauseating group therapy sessions. But he was wide awake, arms raised in jubilation, to celebrate the triumph whenever England balletically slalom through a tournament, slamming penalties with the satisfying shing of the ball whacking the net.
Thankfully director Rupert Goold and Graham balance out the therapy speak with blistering good fan service. At its most unapologetically entertaining, Dear England is a walking talking Madam Tussauds exhibit: Fabio Capello strutting around a gaggle of journalists accompanied by the melancholic brass of the Godfather theme. Even Gary Lineker makes a cameo, Walkers crisps cradled in hand. Gwilym Lee nails Southgate — all angular cheekbones and rippling eyebrows, head craning like a bobble headed heron.
Nor can you resist rooting for the ensemble of players, all sparked with wide-eyed sixth former swagger, led by a pitch perfectly monosyllabic Harry Kane. The tournament sequences ebb and flow with electricity, tense victory and inevitable defeat. Es Devlin’s sleek set sits us right in the thick of it, video game-like graphics projecting the vista of a vast Stadium’s pitch, swallowing us in the grandeur and the anxiety of the penalty kick.
Graham is undoubtedly an intuitive playwright who has carved a theatrical niche in mining the depths of flawed male characters. But traipsing out of the National Theatre with a triumphant rendition of Sweet Caroline blaring over the speakers, the cast goading the audience into compulsory jubilation of a sing-a-long, I wonder what becomes of entertainment in the age of therapy-speak.
My thoughts hark back to Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and its melancholic lament for the old England — the one unblemished by self-regulating culture of key performance indicators and parking regulations. It’s the same England preserved in the spate of football hooligan films of the early noughties. No doubt a riposte to chintzy chick-flicks, the kind of films made for men to cleanse the palette after being dragged to Bridget Jones duplicates by doting girlfriends.
Films like The Football Factory — my personal favourite — are anathema to Dear England’s men-have-feelings positivity. Yes they are stupendously silly and violent, but also wildly entertaining, especially if Danny Dyer is involved. The Southgate philosophy encapsulated in Dear England is important and, like him or not, he brought the England team within arm’s reach of trophies. Great. But as far as art is concerned, give me Gazza and Beckham behaving badly any day.
Dear England plays at The National Theatre until May 24, ahead of a four-week run at the Lowry in Salford.
