In his recent Richard Dimbleby Lecture for the BBC, Gareth Southgate voiced the challenge facing him when he took over the England men’s football team in 2016: “how do you build a positive culture not just for a national football team, but for a nation?” For over 200,000 theatregoers who have now seen James Graham’s play Dear England, that question has already been answered by the heroic, fictionalised Southgate played by Joseph Fiennes in 2023 and now by Gwilym Lee in an updated revival.
Graham makes Southgate a playwright like himself: he teaches his team they need to have three acts to their development. “We’re all storytellers now. And we’re going to take our time with it.” If Graham’s version of Southgate risks seeming too thoughtful, too noble, too concerned with the challenges of ethical masculinity, Southgate’s articulate Dimbleby Lecture comes as a helpful reminder that, perhaps, the real man is indeed that self-reflective. Indeed, in a case of life blending with art, it’s getting increasingly difficult to distinguish between these two men’s voices. Is this a function of their real-life friendship? Is the playwright amanuensis to the footballer, or the footballer muse to the playwright?
Like Southgate, who spoke in his lecture about the challenges facing young men, Graham is concerned with masculinity. Dear England is the story of a father figure raising a pack of young men; this revival arrives in London along with his newer play Punch, which examines the fallout after one young man kills another with a single punch.
Like Dear England, Punch is a portrait of a real person, but that person is no national treasure. It is based on the memoir of Jacob Dunne, who emerged from prison to find redemption with the support of his victim’s parents. That gives it a gritty honesty that Dear England lacks, powered by a central performance from David Shields. Like many of Dear England’s footballers, Jacob grows up without a father, looking for his male tribe: he finds it not in football, but in a gang who bond by picking street fights. James Hodgkinson, a trainee paramedic visiting Nottingham for a cricket match, was their innocent victim. In his depiction of Nottingham’s fault-lines, Graham once again demonstrates his deep sense of place.
‘Dear England’ never challenges the structures by which we channel our collective selfhood through a pack of young men
Punch sometimes feels too much like an advert for restorative justice programmes. Unlike Dear England, however, it asks the hard questions about how we fetishise masculinity. Dear England may put group therapy on stage and condemn racism, but it never challenges the structures by which we channel our collective selfhood through a pack of young men.
The show’s timeline includes the summer when England’s women won the Euros, but you can count in seconds the acknowledgement Dear England gives to this female achievement. That victorious team’s manager, Sarina Wiegman, played by a man in drag, walks across the stage and delivers a couple of words of advice to Southgate without breaking her stride. (No chance of Southgate being played a woman anytime soon: both Fiennes and Lee were self-evidently cast for their resemblance to the man.)
Graham’s revisions to the 2023 text exacerbate these problems. The men’s team caved to anti-LGBT+ censorship in Qatar in World Cup 2022; unforgivably, the meagre stage time initially given to this moral crisis is reduced even further. Only former England women’s team member Alex Scott had the guts to wear a rainbow armband while broadcasting from the pitch; blink and you’ll miss this here. Psychologist Pippa Grange, the only female presence around Dear England’s team, leaves the story even earlier in this arc, given that Southgate’s own journey extends further. It doesn’t help that, as Pippa, Liz White lacks the presence previously lent by Gina McKee.
If the only problem in Dear England were a lack of interest in women, it would be forgivable. This is a play about the men’s football team. Yet it speaks to the more broadly facile elements of Graham’s play. Politicians are caricatures in the background—May, Johnson, Truss—but pride in England’s sporting heroes is a panacea for all the ills they cause. The psychological insights—fear creates inhibition, family expectations shape us all—are fair but basic. As for the new ending? Every leader must know when to leave the stage, but a rich legacy will continue forever. Groundbreaking.
The psychological insights—fear creates inhibition, family expectations shape us all—are fair but basic
I suspect that part of the play’s success is owed to Rupert Goold’s fluid production and Es Devlin’s clarifying set. Goold understands crowds and how to set individuals against them; the football scenes, built with movement directors Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf, are captivating.
Devlin’s sets often overwhelm her directors: her British Museum imitation for the recent Coriolanus, similarly built for the National’s Olivier auditorium, imposed a meta-commentary about our modern heritage battles while penning Lyndsey Turner’s production into confined spaces. Here, however, she has a lighter touch while losing none of her trademark grandeur: the Wembley arch over the stage keeps Southgate’s team within a unifying circle; football lockers rotate around the stage in flexible configurations. This is a masterclass in drawing an audience in through aesthetics alone—and in glossing over the weaknesses of script.
Clearly, thousands of people have responded warmly to Dear England. Football will always draw a crowd, and for some Grange and Southgate’s lessons in abandoning fear will be genuinely moving. But sometimes a play is simply overrated. One newspaper recently termed Dear England: “the decade’s biggest theatrical triumph”. It is undeserved.
