Dear England

Given the universal acclaim garnered by James Graham's National Theatre production of Dear England in 2023, it’s now a challenge to recall how revolutionary the play was at the time. There have been plays about football before, but the likes of Red Lion, The Beautiful Game and Jumpers for Goalposts focused on local communities and working class identity. Dear England examines football at the highest level, forensically examining - to quote Steven Dyke's excellent Physio Phil - the arrogant pricks that play the game.

Centre stage throughout is the man that (almost) single-handedly changed that perception of top flight footballers and in doing so, changed - at least for a while - what it felt like to be English. At the heart of the play is Gareth Southgate's redemption in the eyes of the public, from a world class failure, to a national hero and treasure. Who now can make sense of, or even remember, a Pizza Hut advert mocking Southgate for stepping up to take the bill?

In the original production, Joseph Fiennes played Southgate, an inspired move, not least as the uncanny physical similarity. Having seen that production, I can attest to the long shadow cast over subsequent iterations, but David Sturzaker more than holds his own in the current run. Despite, I was reliably informed, wearing false teeth, he doesn't resemble Southgate, but that seems to free him from the pitfalls of impression. Instead, we get his own take on quiet authority and reflective leadership. He is still an archetype of sorts, but rather than marvel at seeing a man represented, the audience instead listens to what he is saying.

We listen as well, to Samantha Womack, as do the players. I thought her performance was actually more convincing than Gina McKee's original Pippa Grange, exuding not only a stoic authority but also a personal magnetism that I can well believe young men would be inclined to listen to. Of those young men, Oscar Gough's touching portrait of the tongue-tied Harry Kane was an obvious highlight, but was only one of many affectionate performances. Ashley Byam's Sterling, Jayden Hanley's Rashford, Connor Hawker's Maguire and Jack Maddison's Pickford were distinct and recognisable, while the previously mentioned Physio Phil stole every scene he was in.

There were moments, it should be said, when the play seemed to have been left behind by events. The success of the women’s team was touched on, but felt underwritten. Southgate’s attempt to rehabilitate the George Cross now seems niave given how often it’s been recently tied to lampposts. The players taking the knee, and the controversy this caused now seems almost quaint. History can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be changed but the prism through which we view it alters over time, so that incidental detail can take on new meaning, while pointed satire – did the appearance of all those prime ministers ever work – now seems irrelevant. It is a peculiarity of a resolutely modern play that it dates more quickly than any other. How many people, I wonder, were puzzled that Ian Kirkby’s spot on Gary Linekar was eating a bag of crisps?

That said, the staging remained exemplary - the grand sweep of the National's presentation squeezed within the Royal's proscenium arch in such a way that made the performance more intimate yet the theatre somehow bigger. Back projection of Wembley, Russia and film clips signalling the agony and ecstasy of the game, this was spectacle of a grand scale, notwithstanding the stacking chairs and changing booths. With slow motion mime and surtitles keeping score, this was gripping theatre, whether or not you knew the outcome.

And that’s because this play about football was not really about football at all. It was a play that not only questioned identity, but attempted to define it, from the shopkeeper complaining about the absence of an apostrophe in graffiti, to a morris dancer singing about the pleasures of curry sauce. It was about male bonding, humanity, mutual respect, facing your demons, and about meeting with triumph and disaster, and treating those two impostors just the same.