James Graham’s story of the beautiful game and the travails of the England squad has some beautiful moments. It traces the team’s fortunes from the moment their diffident, upstanding and quietly revolutionary manager, Gareth Southgate (Joseph Fiennes, bearing an uncanny resemblance), comes into their lives.
It traces real world events, from penalty shootouts that bring a life-like tension to the aftermath of losing a game. The meat of the play is Southgate’s inspirational leadership of an England squad that’s languishing when he first takes over, and to which he gives new life, leading the team all the way to the semi-finals in the 2018 World Cup and onwards.
But as endearing as it is, the production, directed by Rupert Goold, takes time to really lift off the ground, focusing on story rather than drama in the first half – and it does seem like a game of two halves.
Southgate brings the psychologist, Pippa Grange (Gina McKee), into their training sessions and for a little too long there are fairly static classroom scenes showing Pippa and Southgate encouraging the lads to keep journals, to talk about their fear, to face it. It is touching, and has some very funny lines too, but lacks quite enough drama or conflict, despite Es Devlin’s incredible set – luminous ovals simply yet excellently signifying a stadium, and plenty of movement within it.
Better known for fictionalising the power play in politics, Graham cannot resist infusing football with politics too, with comic cameos from the likes of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, which are very amusing, almost Spitting Image-style imitations.
There are quick glances to the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement too, along with an interrogation of Englishness and the flag – a little too brief though. Racism – within the footballing community or between team members – is touched upon rather than explored.
There are not enough dramatic moments in the first half that grip: it is 50 minutes in, when Southgate recalls his terror at taking and missing a penalty in the Euro 96 semi-finals, that we feel we enter into his emotional world. We want and need more of this – and perhaps more conflict and drama between players themselves – rather than the Dead Poets Society-style “seize the moment” lectures.
Fiennes’s Southgate is slightly geeky, full of earnestness and quiet integrity, and channels more than just an impersonation. But we never really get beneath the skin of Southgate even though he is almost ever-present on stage. We only get snatches of his backstory – such as how he fell in love with the game by kicking a ball against a wall as a kid in Crawley.
The players themselves are endearingly drawn, with actors doing very keen imitations of their real-life counterparts in the first half. Together they represent a group of talented, accidentally funny, immature boys rather than men in the first half, but gain individuality and depth in the second.
The second act as a whole brings more emotional drama over simply telling the squad’s story. The players come to life too, from the sweet, laconic Harry Kane (Will Close) to impassioned Raheem Sterling (Kel Matsena) and good-natured Marcus Rashford (Darragh Hand). We see them in their most nerve-racking moments of penalty-taking – the exhilaration or sense of failure afterwards – and the play implicitly unpicks a kind of masculinity that asks the men to swallow down their difficult emotions.
In Southgate’s reshaping of the squad, we also see something of a re-appraisal of what makes a good leader, too: he is the opposite of the strongman, and his argument is against strongman leadership.
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.
Plays until 11 August at the National Theatre
