Dear England was the first time I’d seen a National Theatre play presented as a recording at the cinema. As a filmed stage show I was very impressed with how cinematic they made the show, and even though at times we heard and saw audience members, my suspicion is that this version was a composite of a live performance and an edit of a filming session without an audience there. I may be wrong on this, but it would have certainly made it easier to get all the angles and perfection in filming that was present there.
The play tells the story of Gareth Southgate’s time as England manager between him taking over as a caretaker manager in the lead up to the 2018 World Cup and the 2022 World Cup.
Joseph Fiennes does an incredible job of becoming Gareth Southgate with the voice, mannerisms and facial expressions all spot on. The story shows how Southgate had the insight to see the failings of the England squad and took a different approach to bring them together and unite them as a team. His main weapon presented throughout is the hiring of psychologist Pippa Grange, played by Gina McKee, who does a fine job to play the outsider whose methods are initial rejected by a sport used to the old ways.
For the most part I really enjoyed the show, and I thought it gave an interesting look at how the team took a good inside look at itself and found a different path to success…or near success.
But whilst I’d say I enjoyed it more than I didn’t enjoy it, what I didn’t enjoy I really didn’t enjoy. By the end of the play it really felt like a drag. It was too long for a cinema experience at least. This included an interval which played out on screen in real time, so would be exactly the same length as in the theatre.
But the length was only a problem because I don’t feel the story had enough good content to justify its length. Genuinely if the play had ended at the interval I feel it would have been much more satisfying. Both in kit overstaying it’s welcome, and also because England overcoming the penalty curse it hd faced of never winning on penalties was a much more satisfying end point.
Instead it then had to restart a lot of its story with the second act, and as it followed the England team from one tournament to the next, it had to show a bunch of characters they’d built up in the first act just get replaced to match the change in England team members. This may be true to real life, but felt jarring in terms of a play structure.
Likewise, the sudden departure of Pippa with her and Southgate not seeing eye to eye anymore came out of nowhere which obviously was something that in real life would have played out over months or a couple of years.
Many of the characters feel like cartoonish versions of their real life counterparts. Will Close was brilliant in his portrayal as Harry Kane, but however enjoyable it was to watch, he still made him come across as a cross between Rodney and Trigger from Only Fools and Horses. Don’t get me wrong, this was fun, but it was this kind of thing throughout the entire show that made me question if the writer, director and team that made the show actually hated England more than love it.
Likewise as great as Fiennes is as Southgate, there is a tinge of Frank Spencer to his version of the character. The only main character who was never shown as a joke in ways was Pippa.
Coming back to Harry Kane, as the show went on so long, they were able to tie his missing a penalty at the 2022 World Cup back to Southgate’s infamous penalty miss at Euro 96. The message seemed to be in the end that Southgate wasn’t there to teach England how to win, but rather teach them how to lose and still carry on. This just about worked, but this point was missed with the same situation where players missed penalties at the previous tournament. Why was Kane’s miss shown as a mirror of Southgate’s and not Rashford, Sancho and Saka’s?
Instead, that section of the story dealt briefly with the racism the players received after the team lost. This was well handled, but was very brief and their roles seemed less important both before and after this section of the play. This is part of the problem I had with the play, in that it tried to cover some more hard hitting topics, but was so brief that it made them seem less relevant than deserved and also like token inclusions.
Same with it also including portrayals of the three Prime Ministers we had during the time period the play is set in. And also brief acknowledgements of Covid and the passing of the Queen. These were all so brief I ended up feeling that all the heavier stuff was just included because it was a National Theatre play and that they had to have social commentary even if it didn’t need including.
Likewise, the show almost entirely ignored the Women’s England team, but for a mention they don’t get priority pitch time. Southgate acknowledges that he wasn’t aware, but he is now, but there is zero payoff to this. Then showing the Women’s team getting a tournament victory was again so token, where it could have been the play showing the unity of England across different aspects of the sport. Instead, it showing Southgate not even getting to touch the Women’s trophy whilst their coach Sarina Wiegman had a one scene cartoonish cameo where she seemed to gloat didn’t read well. Italian played the victory for a laugh and also highlighted Southgate as a humble failure.
Personally I would have cut all of that stuff out, or developed it more. But to develop it more would have made it less Southgate’s story. And if it was his story it should have been just his story. But as it was, it had all this other stuff where the only victory was still smiling in defeat.
All this said, I still enjoyed the show for what it was, but again, it was too long and the longer it went on, the more I felt it was finding as many ways to be anti England as it could under the veil of being pro England in some way.
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