COME ON MY SONS…
At the end of the first half of this exhilarating play, England is through to the World Cup quarter-finals in Russia after several bracing straight wins and an agonizing penalty shoot-out. Which – hurrah, off to the bar! – has defied recent history by giving Gareth Southgate’s team victory and a place in the final. Penalties indeed lie at the heart of the England football story, and especially that of the quiet, gentle manager whose understated epic journey from 2016 to now has caught the imagination of our best political playwright, James Graham.
For football is not happy with the concept of a draw, a tie: if exhausting, brilliant acrobatic atheticism for 90 minutes plus extra-time can’t produce a win, selected players face the terrifyingly exposing ordeal of penalty kicks. Which often – as in that final in Russia – lead to blame falling unfairly on the lad who misses that one lonely, vital goal. Southgate knew all about that crushing blame: at the start of the play , in the great blank circle of light with a crescent faint historic film behind, we see a flashback ,watched by the older man in his waistcoat on the touchline of memory, of the moment in the 1996 World Cup semifinal when he was that man. Germany won and he was mocked ; Just as in the European final in 2020 even more vicious hatred, this time racist, met Rashford, Sancho and Saka. It is one of the oddest, hardest ordeals in sport, a thing to dread. The heart of Graham’s play, therefore, is about character: about admitting doubt and fear, and defeating them , whether you win or not. There were no hugs for him in 1996, so when he was the boss he stood alongside his men before and after, fatherly.
He was brought in, twenty years after his own penalty moment and after years of coaching the under-21s, as a supposedly temporary manager by the bluff Gregs Clarke and Dyke – (John Hodgkinson and Tony Turner). It was a low moment. “we lost to bloody Iceland – a volcanic rock!” There is a nicely harsh satirical sense here of low expectations , and quick sharp impersonations of Graham Taylor, Sven-Goran Erikson etc . Rupert Goold’s direction and the movement choreography are glorious: a fast, agile ensemble, a swirling charivari of fans and players out of which individuals begin to stand out sharply as the story develops. It gives the onlooker the necessary, and breathtaking, sense both of a lumbering random nation of fans and the fine-tuned trained agility of players.
Southgate – Joseph Fiennes an almost uncanny lookalike – does things which alarm Clarke and the rest as he deselects Wayne Rooney, assembles the youngest team yet, and begins to change the culture – laddish-to-loutish – by bringing a female team psychologist, a serene Gina McKee as Pippa Grange, and saying he wants to get them “smiling again” . Over the Southgate years even football outsiders like me started to notice that a quiet gentlemanly figure in a waistcoat was doing something different, creating a civilized , even old-fashioned atmosphere and ambition laced with modern emotional intelligence. As performed here it feels like a benevolent miracle. One glorious moment has the manager telling the lads that they must use their upstairs, their heads, as much as their brilliant legs. Dele Ali objects “I don’t have an upstairs” and is told yes, he does, even if it is a bit ‘spacious’ up there. Gradually, they are asked to do unspeakably unfootballerish things: talk to one another, admit doubt and fear, lark innocently with pool toys.
It is a lovely portrait of team-building and confidence. They win, we rejoice, they lose, we watch to see if they will crumble, how Southgate will manage. HIstory rolls along: Brexit, Covid and the aftermath, anger of black players leading to the defiant taking of the knee, hasty moments of May, Boris, Truss. And underlying it all a growing sense of why – as laid out in Southgate’s real open letter, Dear England – the effort and skill of a national team matters in many backyards across the nation which one player says “sound like shit places, are shit places, but they’re OUR shit places”. So it matters as Southgate says “how we conduct ourselves”. Part of it is learning how to lose, and still dance.
It’s a riveting evening: and what resonates into the wider national spirit is that while they have to forget decades of defeat and declining morale it is a broader, longer tradition that can hold them steady: Southgate gives each the number that they hold in a 150-year procession of England players and as each takes a penalty, he speaks his name and number as he shoots. The past does not have to be a burden. Even when we end in Qatar with…you know what. And Gunnar Cauthery reads the obit, characteristically smug overhead, as Gary Lineker
I saw this few days early, before going on holiday, and have thought fondly of the Southgate spirit during these days of petulant Boris-Dorries-Moggery. Sometimes you just need to be a bit proud to be English…
Nationaltheatre.org. To 11 August
Rating four.
theatreCat 