Dear England review – footballing reboot adds extra time for Gareth Southgate’s exit

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It’s unusual for an award-winning, commercially successful play to be revived with a substantially rewritten second half and multiple new characters. James Graham’s reason for dismantling a hit is that his story of Gareth Southgate’s renewal of the England men’s football team was, in effect, written at half-time.

The 2023 premiere had an implied triumphant coda in which the manager’s methods of psychology and motivation won the 2024 Euros. A 2-1 defeat to Spain in the final last July has made this version of the play more reflective than celebratory, although the fact that the Spanish winner was scored by a substitute after an agonising offside review confirms a strong theme: football as a metaphor for life’s tiny margins between good and bad outcomes.

Gwilym Lee (Gareth Southgate) and company in Dear England

So in the new version, the protagonist becomes Sir Gareth Southgate and additional cameos include his successor, Thomas Tuchel. Original squad members such as Gunnar Cauthery’s crisp Gary Lineker now have new teammates. As Southgate, Gwilym Lee matches the role’s originator, Joseph Fiennes, in uncannily capturing the corkscrew frown and jumping eyebrows. As the Yorkshire-born, Australia-trained team psychologist Pippa Grange, Gina McKee in 2023 foregrounded the northern English while Liz White now emphasises the Antipodean.

Valuable new players include Gamba Cole’s Raheem Sterling, Tristan Waterson’s Dele Alli and Jude Carmichael’s Marcus Rashford – although the rewrite might have dealt more with the fact that so many of the players Graham focused on only two years ago have since lost form.

A weakness remains the simplicity of some minor characters. Graham Taylor and Greg Dyke, respectively a manager and football executive of intelligence and charm, are portrayed as unrecognisable vulgarians. Oddly, Dear England chooses not to dramatise one England manager (Roy Hodgson) and a prime minister of the period (Rishi Sunak).

Due to Spain’s superiority last summer, there is an even greater tension between the play’s willed desire to end in triumph and the reality of England’s tournament performances, although Rupert Goold’s staging (with Elin Schofield credited as revival director) is slicker and swifter than ever and movement directors Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf – in sequences re-creating matches, penalty shootouts and changing room dance-offs – extraordinarily put the ball into ballet.

Dear England increasingly strikes me as a theatrical sibling of The West Wing. Where Aaron Sorkin’s TV drama consoled liberals during the George W Bush years with the fantasy of a Democrat intellectual giant in the White House, Graham offers Southgate as a progressive, gentle, healing alternative national leader, for the period from 2016 to 2024, while the Tories were in fact in charge. That this corrective resonance may survive into a Labour administration is revealing of the state we’re in. The tour to football capitals including Newcastle, Liverpool and Leeds will provide another fascinating context.