Football in theatre may sound like an unusual subject for a play, but the true story behind how footballer turned England manager Gareth Southgate took the Three Lions through the Euros and the World Cup isn’t about winning; it’s about a psychological training experiment that transformed the England players into a unified entity, redirecting disillusionment into something powerfully different. This makes for a highly watchable drama.
In Dear England, writer James Graham describes inside the locker room action in full visceral detail as Southgate attempts to rebuild his team from their interior out. The tactics, mindset and psychology behind the manager's radical methods reveals the internal doubts of the team players, cultural heritages and experiences of racism.
So the stories of young male footballers bearing more than their torsos, jogging alongside light-hearted japes and simplified football language, from cameos of Boris Johnson to the Lionesses clutching their victory cup at the Euros 2022 is lots of fun without ever trading in on depth as the young boys open up to reveal endless wells of insecurity.
The play opens onto Rupert Goold’s incisively directed production with a flashback that came to define Southgate’s entire identity. Helpfully, the former footballer’s penalty miss against Germany in Euro ‘96 is the perfect metaphor for England’s problems, causing the country to be struck out of the competition, thus clouding Southgate’s career and popularity.
With this in mind, it makes sense that he’s a man looking for answers. Things only really take off dramatically when Southgate employs Pippa Grange as the Mary Poppins-style psychologist, impressionably played by Dervla Kirwan, to diagnose the team’s lack of motivation. Here, Graham mines the theory of a national team and what it does to the national psyche. He looks at how each failed penalty shootout has become part of the national narrative, and how Southgate’s young team are not in an isolated bubble, but rather, part of its 150 years of team history.
Joseph Fiennes’s Southgate catches all of this weight in a masterfully timed performance, full of smiley, self-effacing integrity as the affable “Gareth from Crawley” with a lot of pointing to his temples that suggests football is a game of mind over matter, using psychological warfare as missiles, equal in value to physical prowess on the pitch.
Such self knowledge sits at the core of Dear England's power, as Southgate is only ever presented as a genuine man who understands the pitfalls of the game. He instinctively grasps that there’s something going awry with the attitude of the England team and is passionate that changing hearts and minds will help to create a different game and, moreover, a positive experience for the players, whether they win or lose. The outcome is irrelevant, so Southgate upholds.
Set designs from Es Devlin, lit by Jon Clark, frame the stage and action in a supremely slick yet subtle way, creating a strong sense of place without getting in the way of high-octane action. Looming above central stage, hanging from the rafters, sits a shiny white oval—a clever symbol to indicate the roof of a football stadium. As the production propels on, the rotating sets of changing rooms and football pitches create distinct scene changes. Then the back of the stage features projected images; scenes from old matches and statistics flash by, evocative of a vast world and history that this team will be part of.
The movement is also phenomenal and drives the physical action of the play forward in a glorious, energetic buzz of kicking, saving, heading the imaginary ball or joyous jumping. The actors actually feel like football players, and all credit to two movement directors, Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf, whose work is genuinely noticeable in the embodiment of character.
Ultimately, Dear England works because Graham, through the mouthpiece of Southgate, explores why the England players set such high expectations, allowing them to feel a perpetual sense of doom. And furthermore, what do those expectations do to the psychology of both the team and the nation?
The production explores these questions with such joy and spirit, watching the story of football, especially for total non-football-goers, feels like a rare insight into the backstage culture of the team and indeed the game itself. The relationships and their revelations feel so real, you have to pinch yourself it’s all happing on the West End stage. Sound, movement, performances, lighting and music all merge beautifully to create a stirring production from beginning to end.