National Theatre, til 24 May 2025

⭐⭐

Despite its premise, this basic sports story offers little depth, settling for cheap tricks.

The comedian Celya AB has a joke I’ve always liked, where she describes being an immigrant trying to get to grips with English football culture. “I’d like to get into football,” she says wistfully. “But too much of it has already happened and nobody will let me catch up.” Speaking as an immigrant and new football fan myself, she’s captured the sheer scale of the national sporting narrative associated with English football. So you’d think there’d be a lot for playwright James Graham to unpack in his wildly popular Dear England, charting Gareth Southgate’s time as the national coach and his different, altogether more modern approach to football management. Alas, Graham doesn’t seem to have the writing nous to really tackle this topic with any depth, opting instead for a cloying, populist retelling of England’s outings that relies on nostalgia and cheap crowd appeals.

Graham presents a typical underdog sports story in which the English national side begins the play as a much-beleaguered failing franchise. Southgate appears as their knight in shining armour, with a quixotic mission to overthrow the old ways in favour of an approach that centres on the players’ mindset and wellbeing. Joining him on his quest is performance psychologist Pippa (sporting a painful Australian accent), and together they question the national obsession with winning – or perhaps more accurately, with not losing. The play follows the squad across four key tournaments – two world cups and two Euros – as Southgate’s vision takes shape.

I’m a sports fan myself and I do think sports psychology, and the kind of pressure we put on professional athletes, is a great well for excellent stories (like Konrad Marshall’s brilliant book Yellow and Black: A Season with Richmond or the delightful Ted Lasso). But I think Dear England entirely bypasses any thoughtful engagement with the real complexity of this topic, instead focusing on pleasing the crowd with stereotypical sports story cliches. For example, Graham’s Pippa – the main vehicle for sports psychology concepts in the play – espouses a brand of psychology that seemingly takes more inspiration from Instagram quotes than any useful professional insight. The play is critical of the old guard who scoff at Pippa’s ways, but it’s hard not to snigger along with them when she describes the players taking penalties as being “foetal, crouched like children”.

It doesn’t help that the characters are pretty ineffectually drawn. Southgate is the most well-developed character (the best of a bad lot), but even he seems to have only one driving motivation (he’s haunted by his own missed penalty during his playing days, a beat that’s hammered pretty hard). Too many of the players are reduced to comedic one-note characters: Pickford is mental, Kane is dull (boy, is that joke milked for all it’s worth). As a squad they’re also just a bit stupid – of course I’m sure there would’ve been locker-room resistance to Southgate’s approach, but to make out that the players were essentially airheaded schoolboys before his arrival seems pretty unfair.

The one exception to this is when Raheem Sterling and Marcus Rashford express the hurt they suffer as a result of racist abuse, and call on the rest of the team for their support. This is one of the few shining moments of the play, because it’s one of the only times it actually presents any engagement with the darker aspects of football. In a play called Dear England, which so obviously attempts to contextualise football within a kind of national story (there are some pretty lame comedic impressions of the prime ministers of the day, for example), it’s really noticeable that there are only a few scant critiques of how the sport sometimes represents the worst of us. Racism is at least effectively dealt with, but I found it noticeable that there’s no link drawn between the widespread skepticism of Southgate’s approach and the toxic masculinity that remains prevalent in professional sport to this day. The women’s team are referenced very briefly, when Sarina Wiegman wins her Euros trophy and refers to it (accurately) as England’s first silverware since ‘66. Of course this is a story about the men’s team, not the women’s. But it’s another missed opportunity for Graham to do some actual digging – why was a nation so obsessed with ‘football coming home’ not satisfied when their women’s team achieved the feat?

The direction from Rupert Goold is pretty sound, and I think he does a decent job of injecting some dynamism and movement into a play about football in which no-one actually kicks a ball. But aside from this, I’d say the play doesn’t work very well on a number of technical levels. The structuring is a bit of a mess, with the inclusion of dozens of games leaving the play overstuffed and reliant on tedious narration from Gary Lineker. The jokes are repetitive and poor. I also didn’t like Es Devlin’s set design very much – maybe a Nosebleeds first. An enormous screen at the back of the stage and a looped digital display circling above the players’ heads offer footage of matches and Match of the Day-style graphics. It’s technically well executed but it’s altogether too flashy for a stage play – it begs the question why anyone bothered to make this a play in the first place and not a film or TV series. Then at least we’d actually get to watch some goddamn football.

I found Dear England actually angering, which is perhaps ironic given part of what the play is supposedly dealing with is why we all get so angry when entertainment doesn’t meet our expectations. But I think what really made me mad is the play seems so comfortable making the absolute cheapest appeals it can to the audience’s nostalgia and love for the game. The soundtrack, for example, includes two renditions of Bittersweet Symphony and three of Sweet Caroline. All the jokes are of the wink-wink-nudge-nudge variety, as if inviting the audience to think – haha he’s right, Kane is dull! Look, Lineker’s got some crisps! Like in his adverts!

Perhaps I’m just a humbug. The cheap appeals worked – the audience in my performance were really lapping it up, laughing a lot and singing along at the end. They also seemed to be really buying into the tension of the matches, despite me thinking it was enormously boring (I don’t know how you’re ever supposed to find fake sport tense, never mind the fact that we’re watching matches whose outcomes we already know!) I suppose, if my earlier query was why Dear England is a play and not a film, the answer might be because staging it allows Graham and Goold to capture the shared experience of football – watching a moment of drama unfold in real-time alongside a crowd of equally passionate fans. There is something clever in that idea, and the audience’s visible enjoyment – along with decent direction and a few worthy scenes – is what upgrades this from one star to two. It’s not entirely without merit. But if you’re going to give your play the pretentious title Dear England and claim to be telling the story of a whole country’s relationship with a sport, you really ought to offer a bit more than this.

Visit the National Theatre website for tickets to Dear England.