Review: DEAR ENGLAND, National Theatre

On press night, five minutes before curtain, men and women were asking me for the score as England attempted to prise out the last two Australian wickets in the first Ashes Test. Just a year ago, they wouldn’t have bothered, secure in the knowledge that a miserable set of privileged young men would be going through the motions, beaten again. But a revolutionary new regime under a leader, Ben Stokes, like none before, had banished fear, embraced defeat as the price to pay for such a prize and galvanised a nation. 

It has happened before.

James Graham’s terrific new play starts with Gareth Southgate, current England men’s national football team manager, missing his penalty in the Euro96 semi-final shoot-out, slumping to his knees, head in hands as none of his teammates, their dreams destroyed, would catch his eye. If success has many parents, here was failure with none. Two decades later, he reverses his way into the top job largely because he was the last man standing when the FA blazers had tried everything else. He was not what they, the players or the fans expected - but nor were the results.

Joseph Fiennes does a tremendous turn as the man himself, capturing the diffident half-smile, the slight tilt of the head, the boy from Crawley still not sure if he really should be there. That’s standard biopic acting, but he goes on to find a deeper truth. Fiennes slowly builds a commitment to an overarching philosophy in the straight back we see in facing down puffed-up administrators and pundits, in the firm hesitancy in speech, removing the stridency that would otherwise overpower his interlocutor, in his innate sense of how to glide in and out of the spotlight when it suits him rather than others. We laugh at first at the Rory Bremner-like verisimilitude of the portrayal, the physical ticks and the voice, but we soon see that a considerable actor is giving one of the performances of his life, finding what others have found in Henry V.

It’s not all serious stuff. Graham finds a lot of humour in the players, crucially without patronising them. Will Close is his tongue-tied captain, Harry Kane, who buys into the new regime early and finds his voice when needed. Kane has footballing intelligence to burn and it’s pleasing to see him portrayed as a leader through example and commitment rather than a spurious facility with words, the man who has walked the walk without bothering to talk the talk. Close mines all the comic potential of the role but finds poignancy too, the play as much a love letter to England’s captain as to its manager.

Other players are shown growing up in public, that toughest of assignments. Lewis Shepherd’s Dele Alli cannot find himself even in this most supportive of environments, Kel Matsena gives voice to the complexity of Raheem Sterling’s relationship with the more neanderthal element of football’s fanbasea and Darragh Hand explains how Marcus Rashford sees beyond his talent to the people who fostered it and on to his mission to help those less fortunate. Best of all (with convincing work throughout from co-movement directors, Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf) Josh Barrow is the hyperactive goalkeeper, Jordan Pickford, finding the sweet spot between a keeper’s acrobatics and a clown’s pratfalls. 

If this were the sum of Graham’s intent, one might wonder why The National Theatre’s largest stage has been commandeered by director, Rupert Goold, for three hours every evening, but, of course, it’s also an extended metaphor, a full-blooded "state of the nation" play. 

Gina McKee is the psychologist, Pippa Grange, brought in by Southgate to work with players stuck with a history of failure hitched to a counter-narrative of relentlessly high expectations, two stories that jostle in the players’ minds, paralysing them at key moments. She works with the manager to purge a collective neurosis through trust and humility, the outcome less important than the process for once, not least because it’s only the process the players can affect. Generosity of spirit breaks the cliques, opens the minds and frees the feet to express themselves. The results on the pitch and off, follow in the wake of new thinking.

You don’t need the occasional appearance from Theresa May and Boris Johnson to underline Graham’s wider point - that our broken nation, riven by Brexit, poisoned by lies, egged on by social media needs its own Southgate, its own Stokes. Where is the man or woman who can take on a mighty, but moribund establishment with a new moral code and make it stick?

Get the processes right and the results will follow for a politician with the emotional intelligence  and single-minded conviction of a Gareth Southgate.     

Dear England at The National Theatre until 11 August

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner 

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