Review: Dear England at Lyceum Theatre

“A triumph…this is a joy…”

Dear England by James Graham, Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield

By Phil Scown

We know the story.  Gareth Southgate was the England Football Team Manager.  Football didn’t come home and England was hugely disappointed.  This play is the story of Gareth Southgate and the England team from the infamous missed penalty in 1996… against Germany, in the Euros.  Football is the canvas on which the story of Gareth and the English team is painted. The play is not about the canvas, it’s about the story on it – facing our greatest fears, working through and analysing them.  The result is a team that is less fearful, better and happier.

The audience, a full house, is faced with an apparently minimalist set.  The set is black, apart from a large lit ring around the floor, with a white centre spot.  Above is a large bright white ring.  I’ve seen productions with minimalist sets before, and they can work really well.  This minimalism is an illusion.  The blackness is all LCD screen.  It allows the stage to become Wembley Stadium, players names and likenesses, a TV screen.  Combined with football anthems from over the years this is a really immersive experience.  The high-tech set really does work.

Gareth Southgate (played by David Sturzaker) is a man who has had the most public, most humiliating of defeats.  The actions that took him to that point, and took the England team with him, are picked apart.  This isn’t the story of improving football skills and long hours of training to become better footballers.  The story of Dear England is how Gareth, and the England team he went on to manage, became happier people and better players.  It’s not about who we are when we win, it’s about who we are when we lose.

Dr Pippa Grange (Samantha Womack) is the psychologist Gareth employs to turn the team around.  Gareth provides the right environment, with player happiness as his key motivation.  Pippa provides the tools and techniques to bring about measurable improvements in team performance.  There are some statistics, but these enhance the play.  There are not many; it feels just right.

The character of Gareth Southgate is hardly ever off stage.  We see him range from the crushing defeat and disappointment of ‘that penalty’, through the uncertainty of his appointment as caretaker manager, to the elation of a win.  David Sturzaker does a great job in this role and doesn’t falter.

The squad is represented by a few players, and it works.  Harry Kane (Oscar Gough), Marcus Rashford (Jayden Hanley), and Harry Maguire (Connor Hawker) were the players that stuck in my mind, but that’s just me.  All of the players contributed to the feel of a squad in development.  That’s development as players and as human beings. 

There is a lot of comedy in this play, and Jordan Pickford (Jack Maddison) as goalkeeper in penalty practice is hilarious.  Gary Lineker (Ian Kirkby), Greg Dyke (Ian Bartholomew), and Sam Allardyce (Steven Dykes) all provide comic moments.  Others too, but too many to mention each one – which is one of the great aspects of this play.  In the short time of the production, or so it seems, there is so much humour.  These are not just one-liners, but truly comic performances for which the whole cast deserve credit, including the ensemble players (Alex Wadham, Miles Henderson, Ebube Chukwuma, Sam Craig, Natalie Boake, and Stuart Ash). And the depths too – the racism experienced by the black players Bukayo Saka (Jass Beki), Raheem Sterling (Ashley Byam), Marcus Rashford (Jayden Hanley) and Dele Alli (Liam Prince-Donnwelly) is a counterpoint to the comedy.  Getting the whole team to own the issue of racism is a significant moment.

Act two opens with It’s Coming Home.  A rousing scene of preemptive celebration.  And then of course football didn’t come home.  There’s the post-mortem.  Then lockdown, which is something we can all identify with, how our lives changed during the Covid years and the huge personal impacts.

This is theatre where the story, the actors and the set, all come together, leaving the audience elated.  A triumph for the writer (James Graham), director (Rupert Goold), set designer (Es Devlin) and the rest of the creative team.   The audience spontaneously sang along at the finale and gave a standing ovation.  This is a joy.  You don’t have to be a football fan to support Dear England.

Dear England plays at Lyceum Theatre until Saturday 25 October. Tickets are available here.

Phil Scown has been a regular theatre-goer since his student days many years ago. Mysteries, thrillers, ghost stories, comedies and musicals are all part of his theatre diet. Phil writes short stories in a variety of genres, some of which have become screenplays. He likes to tour England, Scotland and France, nowadays by car rather than motorcycle. At other times Phil likes to cook and to drive his Caterham, though generally not at the same time.