Before the European Championship final in the summer of 2021, Gareth Southgate was asked who ought to play him in a movie. “Well, it would have to be someone good-looking,” the England manager replied, with a smile. The matter has now been decided for him, albeit in a play. Joseph Fiennes is the blockbuster choice for the National Theatre production Dear England, a deep dive into Southgate’s transformation of the feeling inside and around the men’s national football team, written by James Graham, the acclaimed playwright and screenwriter. “A very generous casting,” Southgate said recently.
When I meet Graham during rehearsals, he is recalling his first meeting with Fiennes to discuss the project. “Joe had wanted to come back to the National for, like, 20 years.” He had last starred there in Love’s Labour’s Lost in 2003. “I’m sure he probably thought he’d come back and play Henry V or King Lear,” Graham says. “Now he’s Gareth from Watford.”
It is impossible not to smile, mainly because of the discombobulating nature of the premise. How can the “introverted, decent” Southgate – to borrow a couple of words that Graham uses – command the 1,100-seat Olivier theatre, the largest of the three at the National? “Historically,” adds Graham, “it’s had warriors and leaders: you charge with your sword and give a Shakespearean soliloquy. That’s not Gareth.”
Southgate’s reaction has been typically unassuming, self-conscious even. Does he intend to see the play? “No, I won’t be going,” he has said. “It wouldn’t feel right. I don’t know what to make of it, really.”
Graham is nevertheless captivated by his protagonist and has felt that way since the 2018 World Cup, Southgate’s first tournament as the England manager. This was when he took a likeable young squad to the semi-finals, creating a feel-good factor and burying the nation’s penalty curse with the last-16 shoot-out win over Colombia into the bargain.
“In the first instance, Gareth’s not obviously captivating, is he?” Graham says. “But there is something epic about him – just not in the obvious ways. So how do you hit the back row of this auditorium with a quiet man? Can goodness fill a space rather than violence and rage? Joe was just really tickled by the role. And I’d imagine it is that glorious juxtaposition of small and huge. It’s a really quiet guy – with the role of England manager, the Impossible Job.”
Graham has made his name with studies of UK institutions, and what happens when those institutions are put in a moment of “crisis or change, and/or an individual comes in and disrupts it, or asks a huge existential question about why do we do this.” His breakout play in 2012, This House, portrayed life in the House of Commons, and his subsequent topics have included the Labour party, Rupert Murdoch and the Sun newspaper, as well as Brexit. He is fascinated by idiosyncrasies and anomalies, examining shifts in the national mood through his subjects.
Graham grew up in Kirkby-in-Ashfield and he watched a bit of Mansfield Town as a boy and a bit more Nottingham Forest. He was never an obsessive club football fan. But England was a different story, the bug biting when he was 13 and watched them lose to Germany in the Euro 96 semi-final, with Southgate missing the crucial penalty in the shoot-out at Wembley. “It was the first time I cried over a football match,” Graham says. “I could not understand what I was feeling, why it felt so bad. That just got me so fascinated by it. It’s the drama and the scale of it I love.”
Graham remembers how the England team were at rock bottom in September 2016 when Southgate was brought in – initially as interim manager after the departure of Sam Allardyce, who lasted only one game before being caught in a newspaper sting. England had been humiliated by Iceland at the European Championship in the summer of that year, leading to the resignation of Roy Hodgson. The players did not relish being called up. The shirt was heavy.
“The first story-beat of the play,” says Graham, “is Iceland, Allardyce. The country is in the grip of the Brexit referendum aftermath, and in comes Gareth. There is something Shakespearean about it, isn’t there? The guy who has been off the international stage, really, since that famous penalty miss, being asked to return and help. He immediately says to the Football Association, as in our play, ‘The scale of the challenge is bigger than you think. The question we need to ask of football and sport is bigger than the one we are asking.’”
Southgate’s tenure has been marked by consistently good tournament finishes: semi-final, final, then quarter-final at the 2022 World Cup. His team are among the favourites for Euro 2024. But it has also been defined and enabled by his empathetic man-management; his ability to strike the right tone in any room and on any subject; to unite. He has broken down barriers, including those with the media, by encouraging the players to be more open, to tell their stories, to own the narrative. He has reshaped the culture, made the shirt lighter.
Graham gets emotional when he rereads Southgate’s 2021 open letter – Dear England – which gives the play its title. In it, Southgate talked about tolerance, equality, inclusivity, and the responsibility he feels to use his voice on social issues, and to empower his players to use their voices.
“The idea that an England manager can play some part in what we normally associate with a politician or an activist or a religious leader – it’s beautiful,” Graham says. “None of this is the normal sports media narrative. Something way more interesting and complicated is happening – and theatre is a space to handle those nuanced, difficult things.
“There’s a question about whether or not Gareth and his England team are a symptom of something else that is happening in society, or whether they are influencing it. I like to believe it is the latter. If you ask the question ‘How did England beat the penalty curse against Colombia?’, thrillingly, I think it is more than just player selection and practice. It is this harder to measure, hard to define cultural mindset; a psychological, emotional shift in the team.”
The casting of Southgate’s players led to plenty of traction on social media. “People were trying to predict who would be Bukayo Saka, who would be Raheem Sterling,” Graham says. “I thought, ‘No, we’re not going to go down the route of famous actors.’ What we’ve done is similar to what Gareth did in 2018: use young, innocent, fresh out-of-drama-school guys. It’s going to give people a real chance.”
But how to capture the action? It has been a problem for football productions, particularly on TV and film. The answer, says Graham, lies with theatre’s “non-literal” weapons: “the language of the walk to the penalty spot”, for example, the spectacle of it. “You could imagine that in a huge theatre,” he adds. “The relationship between player, ball and goalkeeper.”
There will not be a huge amount of gameplay but rather an emphasis on character and experiences – and there have been an array of those for Southgate and his players, relating to subjects such as racism, hooliganism and mental health. Gina McKee plays Pippa Grange, the psychologist who was appointed by the FA for the 2018 campaign, and with whom Southgate is still in touch. Graham met Grange as a part of his research, as he did Southgate. “Gareth helped me understand a few things that are going to really help the play,” Graham says. “He was enlightening and generous, as you’d expect.”
The National wants to attract and retain a new audience for what is an unusual crossover venture. Will it feel like a football crowd? “I’ve never been one to write plays where the lights go down at 7.30pm and you sit in the dark.” Graham says. “The joy of theatre, like sport, is that it’s a collective community thing, and I like designing plays where the audience members are aware of each other. In This House, we had Commons benches on the stage with audience members sitting alongside MPs.
“In Dear England there is song and movement and actors running into the audience. You want to feel it’s a bit like a carnival. But then, in moments of great care, for the focus to be on an exchange between two people talking about something delicate. It’s possible to do both, and then the audience will tell us how they respond.”
Could Southgate yet be tempted to join it? Graham hopes so, just as he would love for other figures from the game to come: maybe Gary Lineker or Wayne Rooney, who also appear in the play.
“I just think Gareth is one of the nation’s greatest playwrights at the moment,” Graham says. “In terms of how he is finding language to solve a problem, to capture a mood, to tell a really brilliant and inspiring story on a national stage. That’s what I do. And he is trouncing me.”
Dear England is at the National Theatre, London, from 10 June to 11 August
