WHAT IS IT to be a man in this world of crippling hyper-sensitivity and wokeness? The metaphors central to a sport which has traditionally defined all the values of male hegemony are front and central and joyfully politically incorrect in James Graham’s new play, Dear England, based as it is on the trials and discomforts faced by the England football team through a rash of world cups. It’s an engaging and exciting work, that reaches into fact in a way that flays its theatrical presence a tad. It’s on screen through National Theatre Live at Cinema Nouveau throughout the country on 24, 25, 28 and 29 August 2024.

If you are not a close follower of the doings and undoings of international football fixtures or the personalities who occupy roles of leadership as time unfolds and the game develops, Dear England remains a thrilling yarn which plaits together the vagaries of manhood with the platitudes of war and combat. Beautifully choreographed and cast, it presents Joseph Fiennes in the role of the England football team boss, Gareth Southgate. With a career criss-crossed by stardom and major disappointment, he become a controversial leader of the eleven players culled from British football’s local teams, to represent the country internationally.

And his training edge for these new conscripts? The touchy-feeliness of psychotherapy embodied in the stern but wise character of Pippa Grange (played by Gina McKee). The work is classically structured with the sensational ups and downs that ‘our’ team faces, from unprecedented success against all odds to the behemoth of racism crudely shoved in the faces of the black players, all the way through to the final denouement. It’s about ritual and chance and personal bests but it’s also about demons of historical failure that stand on all of our shoulders.

The set is clever, featuring 11 door-like wooden structures, which function as entrances to change rooms, but also a portal to character switches, which are conducted with pristine clarity, satisfying on the eye and mind. And the ball? Difficult to get your head around this fact, but the ball is mimed, perfectly. There is harsh flickering in the lighting which can affect viewers with photosensitive epilepsy.

The notion of the penalty knock-out in the overtime aftermath of a closely matched game, however, is a beautifully made vortex central to the play. It is here, with the help of lighting and sound, in which boy becomes man, faced as he is by the whole world waiting to see what he will do with the pressure, his body, the clock and the ball. Even the most buffoonish, childish or awkward players here, reach a moment of quiet solemnity in which you get to see them as earnest combatants and adults.

Where this play suffers, however, is its closeness to fact. This work could easily have ended at interval, allowing the career path of Southgate to dwindle into the audience’s understanding of how stories end. And taking astute cuts to the yarn as a whole: the second half cannot better the momentum of the first half, narratively, and feels long and fidget-worthy. Like works of the ilk of Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, there is a perfect ending, which allows the story to remain mysterious and discrete without forcing lines of engagement down the collective audience throat, platitudes attached. The press team of Dear England promised that Graham would rework the ending of this play depending on where Southgate’s career went from where he left it in 2023, but that almost misses the point of live theatre, and makes it feel a tad like stalking the poor man. Evocative in a bizarre way of Jorge Luis Borges’s suggested map of the world, in his short story On Exactitude and Science, which is the same size as the world, itself.

The seam between crackling good football narrative and contemporary historical fact gets overstepped in this work, which features beautiful performances across the board, from Will Close as unwilling and awkward team captain Harry Kane, and the articulate player from Jamaica, Raheem Sterling (played by Kel Matsena).

Unless you are a stickler for facts, and don’t worry about the actual facts, this is a beautiful play, but you’d be quite safe to leave at half time, your head buzzy with the thrill and magic and manliness of the beautiful game.

• Dear England is written by James Graham and directed by Rupert Goold and Christine Lalla for the Olivier Theare in London in 2023. It is performed by Josh Barrow, Tashinga Bepete, Gunnar Cauthery, Will Close, Joseph Fiennes, Will Fletcher, Ebenezer Gyau, Darragh Hand, Miranda Heath, John Hodgkinson, Lloyd Hutchinson, Albert Magashi, Kel Matsena, Gina McKee, Lewis Shepherd, Griffin Stevens, Tony Turner, Paul Thornley and Ryan Whittle. Produced and presented by National Theatre Live it screens at Cinema Nouveau in South Africa on 24, 25, 28 and 29 August 2024.