THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Football eh? It's worse than theater, everyone's a critic, and there are yards more 'comment' pages devoted to it in the newspapers. Theater rarely dabbles in sport but this pulsing, heart rending, drama which recounts Gareth Southgate's transformation of the English football team does it better than any other.
This marks yet another triumph for James Graham, now firmly established as one of Britain's great dramatists. With an impressive track record in plays about crumbling institutions (parliament, the press,) or great state-of-the-nation TV dramas such as Sherwood, the travails of the English Football team was a good choice.
Es Devlin's design immediately catches the eye, and it exploits the Olivier's Greek amphitheater style layout perfectly. Two huge rings of neon, one framing the revolve, and another tilted overhead, invoke a sporting arena where penalties are taken, but also the dressing rooms and training rooms where battles of another kind play out. Rupert Goold's direction is lightning fast but assured and the piece has a great pulsating energy. The revolve works wonders for quick montage sequences where the public mouth off. Tech credits throughout are superb, particularly Dan Balfour's and Tom Gibbons' sound design.
England, despite giving football to the world, has suffered a long pattern of loss. In 2016 a young manager Gareth Southgate, who himself lost a famous penalty shootout in '96, is brought in to rescue the team. He's confronted by a clutch of diva players whose minds are on their clubs and not their country, a skeptical support team set in their ways, and a senior management who treat him as passing place-filler. John Hodgkinson delights as the cynical FA 'suit' who pleads with him to take on the job only to undermine him by challenging any kind of training that isn't kicking a ball.
Joseph Fiennes has returned from US to play Southgate and he's a revelation. Not only does he capture the essence and voice of the man (it helps that he's the spitting image) but, with beautifully detailed touches, he nails the self-effacing, modest charm of Southgate. Central to the job was to bring in a sports psychologist, Pippa Grange, expertly played by Gina McKee, who worked on the team's fear of failure and build from there.
While it's invidious to single anyone out in this great ensemble cast, where many play multiple roles, Will Close's perfect recreation of team captain Harry Kane's deadpan delivery is a particular comic highlight with the audience.
Graham's dialogue is masterful in how he makes inarticulacy sing while cutting through to the emotional nub of a scene, and how he fashions a clear dramatic arc here out of this huge panoply of characters is quite impressive.
American readers might ask but "Didn't England still lose under Southgate?", and sadly they did, but never underestimate this country's love of the one who tries. The dramatic meat here is Graham's relating of how Southgate painstakingly rebuilt the trust between the terraces and the dressing room, which was vital. Before his time, crashing out of tournaments in those unbearable penalty shoot-outs led to riots, but when the team crashed out of the Euros final in 2021 things were much calmer.
Then, the three young black players who missed - Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka - were subjected to typical racist abuse but also a greater backlash of sympathy. The play deftly explores how those young men finally took an uncompromising stance on the constant racism and in doing so effected change. In the end, the vast majority of fans saw beyond the game and responded to the innate decency of characters like Rashford, who off the pitch became a great campaigner against food poverty. The tabloids' attempts to besmirch the three backfired.
By the end, Graham argues, it's not just the players and staff who had matured, so had the country and this was down to Southgate's quiet, unshowy, personality. Now there's an English archetype.
[Advice to readers: at least while you're here don't call it soccer! - JOC]
[...even though soccer was originally a British term for it! In the 19th century it was called Association Football to differentiate it from Rugby Football – Brits only stopped using 'soccer' because Americans used it! - pedantic ed]
