If the Three Lions lift the men’s Euros trophy this summer, they will have rewritten the script when it comes to England’s fortunes in major football tournaments.
But it won’t be the only script to be rewritten. The Olivier-award winning play Dear England, which tells the story of the England men’s football team under Gareth Southgate, is returning to the stage with a final act that could very well change.
Written by James Graham and directed by Rupert Goold, the play will return to the National Theatre, in London, next spring, followed by a four-week run at the Lowry, in Salford.
Its announcement coincides with the Euros, where England are one of the favourites, and could include a redemption arc for the skipper, Harry Kane, whose crucial penalty miss against France in the World Cup concluded the drama during its last run.
“I don’t want to jinx it, but in terms of the talent we have this feels like a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring it home at last,” Graham told the Guardian. “I’ll be changing the play depending on what happens, and I don’t quite know what that will look like.”
He added: “We programmed the original play before the Qatar World Cup, and we knew the tournament would be the third act of the play. In the end it was Kane missing the penalty and repeating the fate of his mentor, but this time there were mechanisms in place to support him. In the same way, I’m confident no matter what happens in the Euros, it will still illuminate the tailend of the Southgate project.”
Graham will attend the Euros as part of his research – both for the play and for the upcoming BBC TV adaptation (in which Joseph Fiennes will reprise his role as Southgate). Graham also recently spent a day at St George’s Park with Southgate for an on-the-ground insight into the internal machinations of the squad.
“Sometimes reacting to real events feels like a gimmick or like you’re desperately chasing a story to stay relevant, but for me that’s the joy of theatre, it’s live,” he said.
“I found it quite intimidating to put England on stage in the first place. The team belongs to all of us, and my England is different to other people’s England. But it’s about embracing that and having all of those different feelings and prejudice, hopes and dreams in the room at the same time.”
The play tells the story of Southgate’s attempts to transform the England team’s physical and mental acuity, drawing on the help of a psychologist to teach them how to accept losing before they can win games again.
It also examines the role the team play in English society. Graham, better known for fictionalising politics (including in the acclaimed TV films Coalition and Brexit: The Uncivil War) includes comic cameos from the likes of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and touches on the Black Lives Matter movement and English identity.
The play’s title is drawn from Southgate’s 2021 open letter, in which he talked about tolerance, equality, and the responsibility he feels to use his voice on social issues.
“Southgate has become a hugely significant national figure beyond the game,” Graham said. “As much as the prime minister and the archbishop of Canterbury, the England manager looks after the soul of the nation. Southgate is a great steward of that.”
As a fan, Graham said, he’d “love nothing more” than an England victory. “It feels like an itch not scratched, a gaping hole in the middle of our national psyche.” But as a dramatist, he’s more interested in “a meaningful, beautiful ending”.
Elite sport, he added, had the power to start “really difficult conversations about masculinity, trust, kindness and vulnerability”. The problem with previous England squads was their propensity to “chase a quick win” instead of regenerating.
“After Germany lost to England in the early 2000s they were so traumatised they went on a decade-long reboot of the game called ‘Das Reboot’. This applies to us politically as well. Why do we struggle to reboot in a way that other nations seem happy to do?”
Graham said it was “truly mad” that the Euros coincided with a general election.
“Southgate became the England manager a couple of weeks after the Brexit referendum, as the country turned on its axis and started to go on a brand new, much more chaotic journey of existential angst. We’ve had five prime ministers and however many housing or culture secretaries, but the one constant has been Southgate. The idea that at the end of this journey, we might finally win a trophy, there’s got to be some meaning in that. The universe is having a laugh.”
He said politically the country had “either been in an impossible paralysis, or gone backwards when it comes to standards of living or people’s faith in democracy.
“People feel exhausted by the political drama because it’s been absurd. What’s the point when you have a prime minister that lasts 45 days? It’s like the matrix glitching. The one area where we’ve actually advanced is English football.”
The playwright, who comes from a former mining community in Nottinghamshire, also spoke about the “disgraceful” disappearance of arts education from state schools.
“The complete collapse of school orchestras and school plays, the loss of drama teachers, and the closing of theatres in schools has been devastating,” he said. “By not including a single arts subject in the core curriculum you are philosophically telling students and parents that there is no intrinsic value in studying an arts degree.
“But you don’t have to become an actor or a playwright to benefit from classes like drama, which give you a space to learn how to communicate and express yourself, and to understand the value of empathy by seeing other points of view.”
He said restoring art subjects to the core curriculum was “the bare minimum” of what a future Labour government needed to do, “not just to create future artists from working-class communities like I come from, but to create future audiences too”.
Dear England will run at the National Theatre 10 March-24 May 2025 and at the Lowry from 29 May-29 June 2025.
