Kirkby playwright’s football smash-hit captures England’s exhilarating highs and slow emotion replays

Dear England dramatises Gareth Southgate’s struggle to lead the “greenest team ever put on the pitch” to last year’s showdown with Spain.

"The Shakespearean structure of his story also really delighted me,” said Graham in a recent interview.

"The idea that the guy who was most famous for missing a penalty in 1996, would come back twenty years later and lead them to winning again - and by doing so analyse his own trauma - it really appealed to me.”

This is a play of many halves: as exhilarating, sad, fractious, hilarious, frustrating and thought-provoking as all great sporting and theatrical events about our national character should be.

David Sturzaker’s suitably-haunted Southgate compels as the waistcoat-wearer dead-set on protecting his team, and redeeming himself in the process.

He’s ably supported by a splendid troupe of actors, whose laddish attitudes are challenged by Samantha Womack’s acutely-Australian team psychologist Pippa Grange.

The uniformly-excellent performances are as polished as the production, which incorporates rapid-fire costume changes, dazzling zoetrope effects and revolving changing-room-locker-like exits.

Dear England had a sell-out run at the National Theatre before it transferred to the West End in 2023, where it won best new play at the Olivier Awards last year. It will now tour until March 2026.

Graham, who re-wrote his play after last year’s Euros defeat, said Southgate embodied “everything we didn’t have in our politics at that time: a long-term plan, a genuine desire to unite people around a particular project, rather than divide people and cause upset and pain and toxicity.”

I can’t rate this play highly enough so I’ll just say this: if you love theatre, but hate football – or vice versa – I would heartily recommend you watch Dear England, which runs at Nottingham Theatre Royal until Saturday, September 27.

Afterwards, on Angel Row, Market Square looked like Manhattan and I felt as weightlessly-elated as if’d scored every goal in 1966.