Review Roundup: DEAR ENGLAND, Starring Joseph Fiennes
Dear England will play through 11 August.
By: Nicole Rosky Jun. 21, 2023
The National Theatre is now presenting Dear England, a new play by James Graham, directed Rupert Goold, telling the story of the England men's football team under Gareth Southgate's management.
Led by Joseph Fiennes (The Handmaid's Tale, The Mother) as Gareth Southgate, it also stars Gina McKee (My Policeman, Bodyguard) as Pippa Grange, Josh Barrow as Jordan Pickford, Gunnar Cauthery as Gary Lineker, Will Close as Harry Kane, Crystal Condie as Alex Scott, Will Fletcher as Jordan Henderson, Sean Gilder as Sam Allardyce, Darragh Hand as Marcus Rashford, John Hodgkinson as Greg Clarke, Adam Hugill as Harry Maguire, Albert Magashi as Jadon Sancho, Kel Matsena as Raheem Sterling, Abdul Sessay as Bukayo Saka, Lewis Shepherd as Dele Alli, Paul Thornley as Mike Webster, Tony Turner as Greg Dyke and Ryan Whittle as Eric Dier. Nick Barclay, Tashinga Bepete, Will Harrison-Wallace and Miranda Heath complete the company. The cast will also be playing additional roles as part of the ensemble.
With set design by Es Devlin, costume design by Evie Gurney, lighting design by Jon Clark, movement direction by Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf, sound design by Dan Balfour and Tom Gibbons, video design by Ash J Woodward, casting by Bryony JarvisTaylor, dialect coach Richard Ryder and associate director Elin Schofield.
Let's see what the critics had to say...
Gary Naylor, BroadwayWorld: 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.
Houman Barekat, New York Times: Joseph Fiennes is outstanding as Southgate, who is portrayed as self-effacing but assertive, an approachable father figure to his young charges. Will Close, as England’s captain and star player, Harry Kane, plays up the striker’s famously laconic manner, providing a bathetic counterpoint to the coach’s earnest rhetoric. Adam Hugill is similarly amusing as the defender Harry Maguire, who is portrayed as a lovable simpleton — not the sharpest tool in the box, but solid and dependable.
Nick Curtis, Evening Standard: Rupert Goold’s production is pacy and dynamic and Joseph Fiennes uncannily captures Southgate’s distinctive diction and his careful blend of confidence and diffidence. At times it’s necessarily schematic: there’s a lot of sporting history, a lot of biography and a lot of hurt packed into the three-hour running time. But this show is witty, clever and at times heart-in-mouth exciting enough to win over even those who don’t care about football. I know, because I was one of them, until Southgate’s squad finally made me see what my wife and all my friends had been banging on about for so long.
Clive Davis, London Times: He shoots; he scores. James Graham’s fast-moving portrait of Gareth Southgate’s reign as the England football manager is a joyous example of populist theatre. There’s anguish, joy and a surprisingly generous helping of humour. Three years ago, on the National’s Dorfman stage, Rafe Spall gave us a stunning insight into the mind of an obsessive England fan in Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s audacious monologue Death of England. Graham’s drama operates on a much grander scale: it sometimes feels as though the entire English nation has its vox pop moment on the designer Es Devlin’s uncluttered, revolving circular space.
Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph: Is England football manager Gareth Southgate a miracle worker who has transformed the men’s team’s fortunes and put a spring in the step of the country as a whole, his goal not just trophies (albeit that’s the necessary aim) but improved mindsets, collective inner wisdom?
Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: There is power in seeing the story of football told on the biggest stage of the National Theatre, with rousing moments in the second half, and it is beautiful from start to finish in its optics. So it scores, ultimately, even if it does not quite bend it like Beckham.
Jessie Thompson, The Independent: 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.
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out: Uncannily captured by Joseph Fiennes, the mild-mannered ‘Gareth from Crawley’ is not, of course, a classically inspirational leader in the Hollywood biopic mould. And therein lies much of the appeal of ‘Dear England’: Southgate is never presented as perfect or a genius, but as a decent, ordinary, but driven man. That last part is the key. What makes him extraordinary is his attunement to failure. He senses there’s something wrong with the psychology of the England team that nobody has ever been able to articulate, and he can’t let it go. He’s not a machiavellian schemer. But he’s likeable and kind and then he has a gut-level understanding of England’s faults that he pursues remorselessly.
Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: Graham is clear-eyed about the brutality of the choices and burdens of professional sport, and he doesn’t exempt Southgate from criticism. Occasionally the writing gets bogged down in incident – the woman next to me was confused by the details of the ban on OneLove armbands in Qatar – and in its own metaphors. But as a drama, it is utterly absorbing, full of twists and turns, vivid characters, proper conflicts, and great lines. If you’re not a football fan you might not appreciate every beat, but I suspect you will find it impossible not to be swept away by its sheer panache and invigorated by its message. And if you love football, as I do, you’ll be left full of admiration for the way Graham has created another powerful epic for our times. He shoots, he scores! Again.
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