I know nothing about football. Actually, that’s not true. I have two sons who grew up in Manchester, one a City fan, the other, well, the other, and I’ve lived here for 30 years, so it would be impossible not to know something about it. But what I do know could be written on the back of the proverbial stamp, and to be frank, I couldn’t care less. And yet, at the end of the penalty set piece that closes act one of James Graham’s Dear England, there was water in my eye.

But that’s because this is not a play about football. It’s about the people who play it, work in it, and live it. ‘Football’ bears the same relation to Dear England as Elsinore Castle does to the plot of Hamlet. All of human life is there, and the cast of 25 and backstage team of 31, directed by Rupert Goold, play it beautifully on Es Devlin’s elegant, bare, circular revolve, which is exquisitely lit by Jon Clark, with a highly atmospheric sound design by Dan Balfour and Tom Gibbons.

Graham and the company set out to tell the story of Gareth Southgate’s tenure as England manager from 2016 to 2024. This might seem rather niche, not to say recondite, as a theme for such a large production, but the task confronting Southgate was Herculean, and his actions heroic.

Southgate inherited an organisation whose culture was macho and entitled, with nothing to back it up. England may have invented football, but its record since winning the World Cup in ’66 was dismal. They got into competitions but were knocked out, often during a penalty shoot-out when the match was a draw and the result was determined by a series of penalty kicks. When he took over, England men’s team had not won a penalty shoot-out for 20 years, not since Southgate himself missed a penalty in the 1996 UEFA semi-final, costing England a place in the final.

As he saw it, the task before him was to change the culture of the organisation. To find a way of melding this group of men who all worked for different clubs most of the time, and only came together occasionally, into a team. To get a bunch of overpaid, overpraised, not necessarily particularly bright men to care about each other. The play is the story of how, despite resistance at all levels, he did it; with the result that he was the most successful England Manager since Sir Alf Ramsay in 1966.

Writer Graham has form for taking what might seem rather dry stuff and turning it into great drama. His 2012 National Theatre play This House about the whips’ offices in the House of Commons between 1974 and 1979, when the Government had a majority of only one, won the Bloomsbury award for Best Play of the Decade. And director Goold has form for producing spectacular set pieces. I saw his production of Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search Of An Author in which act one ends with a young girl drowning in an all-glass fish tank, before your very eyes. He works a similar magic here.

With such a large cast working beautifully together it would be invidious to select anyone for special mention. But I’m going to do it anyway. Gwilym Lee as Gareth Southgate is calm and considered despite the greatest provocation, and holds the centre while things fall apart around him. I last saw him on telly in SAS Rogue Heroes where he played a very different sort of chap, and he was Brian May in the Queen movie Bohemian Rhapsody. That’s quite a range. Liz White as Pippa Grange, the psychologist Southgate brings in to help get the team to open up and trust each other, is also cool and centred, but shouting fandom is not far away. And John Hodgkinson in a number of roles, particularly the chairman and a passing vicar, was not cool at all. I laughed my socks off.

Southgate’s tenure straddled two of the most disturbing periods in our recent history, Brexit and Covid. The title Dear England comes from the open letter Southgate wrote to the England fans during Covid, in which he explained why he cared about England and the team, why the team cared, and why the people should care. Perhaps if we had had a PM as intent on uniting the British people as the England football manager, history might have been different.

Whether you know anything about football or not, this is a great night out.

By Chris Wallis, Theatre Editor

Main image: Gwilym Lee as Gareth Southgate in Dear England. Image: Marc Brenner.

 

Dear England is at Lowry in Salford until June 29, 2025. For more information, click here.