Dear England review: National Theatre’s Southgate play is a solid team effort but no shots on target

Back in 1998, the boundary-pushing late playwright Sarah Kane wrote an essay entitled, “Why can’t theatre be as gripping as footie?” In it, she admitted, “I frequently walk out of the theatre early without fear of missing anything. But however bad I’ve felt, I’ve never left a football match early, because you never know when a miracle might occur.” I wonder what she would have made of James Graham’s much-anticipated Dear England, which retells the story so far of Gareth Southgate’s often miraculous management of the England men’s football team, but has the feel of an unmemorable 0-0 draw.

Graham and director Rupert Goold have a track record for putting real-life events on stage in ways that are entertaining and insightful. Think of 2017’s Ink, which charted Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun. Or last year’s Tammy Faye, an Olivier-winning musical about the eyeshadow-loving televangelist. Dear England kicks off (sorry) with Southgate (Joseph Fiennes) watching his younger self after his notorious Euro 96 semi-final penalty miss against Germany, before following his quest to change the culture of the England squad, which has long been beleaguered by high expectations and consistent failure. “I think we all have a problem with what it means to be England at the moment,” a thoughtful Southgate tells the cynical FA suits. He drops Rooney, picks a young, up-for-it new team, and hires Pippa Grange, a sports psychologist who will transform their mindset.

At almost three hours, Dear England is ambitious, but often overloaded by the sheer number of events since 2016. It covers three tournaments, but also three prime ministers and the pandemic; at one point, we see Theresa May grinding to Fat Les’s raucous 1998 football anthem “Vindaloo”. While Graham’s intention, to explore what the England team represent in the broader picture of our national identity, is an intriguing one, the play ends up giving us few new insights. Often it feels like a cut-and-paste job, a highlights package of the last few years, without the helter-skelter emotion of the beautiful game itself. The most thrilling moments are the recreations of two penalty shootouts, but they’re still a poor substitute for rewatching the real thing. (If you’re a sadist, that is.) Moments that are significant to the story – the racist fallout of the Euros shootout against Italy, the later Euros victory of the women’s team – end up glossed over.

But Fiennes’s portrait of Southgate is remarkable: he captures the gentle head nods, the toothy smile that sometimes feels more like a grimace, the soft, nervy exterior hiding a steely inner resolve. But in Grange, played by Gina McKee, the Ted Lasso-fication of sport looms large. This is a world where the knotty issues of masculinity can be solved if men just hug each other more and write in their journals. Rather than being integrated properly into the action, she feels like a patronising, middle-class figure who tells us what we’re meant to think, saying things like, “until we are empowered, our fear will always limit us”. About penalty shootouts, she says, “collective trauma is real”.

Elsewhere, the production can feel cliched. The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” puts a real shift in during the first act. Different managers are portrayed as caricatures, with Graham Taylor seemingly only depicted to repeat his infamous “do I not like that” quote. The young cast portraying the players are as likeable as the squad itself, with Josh Barrow’s Jordan Pickford and Will Close’s Harry Kane particular standouts, but too many of the jokes revolve around them being nice but a bit dim.

Sometimes, Dear England simply resorts to easy wins – colourful, lively singalongs to “Sweet Caroline”. Crowd-pleasing as they are, they’re jarring in a story that’s really about learning how to lose. A frustrating evening, then – like seeing your team put in a solid defensive performance but fail to get any shots on target. But, of course, we still believe.

National Theatre, until 11 August