It is not common. This feeling of confident excitement as you wait for the curtain to go up. It is about as rare as being certain that England are going to win a big match. Ah, but Dear England is by James Graham, who over the last decade has altered what we expect from the theatre – not least on the stage of the National – and the expectation is justified. Once again the playwright shows his particular gift, for writing a popular play with a resonant social theme. He is mightily helped by director Rupert Goold – who moves from production to production like a theatrical oxygen cylinder – and by a tremendous performance, one of the best of the year so far, from Joseph Fiennes. Oh, and did I say it is about football?
Dear England takes its name from the open letter the national football team’s manager, Gareth Southgate, wrote to fans in 2021, pleading for a more generous, more ample, more interesting view of what the country could be. Graham vividly sketches the particular mess in which the team found themselves before Southgate tiptoed in to take over: though seldom winning, they still considered themselves a top talent; any loss was an insupportable shock. Graham does not need to batter home the point that this could be considered the equivalent of the sense of inherited privilege that has helped to make the country flounder.
To much eye-rolling, Southgate brought in a psychologist to help the team look at who they were. Players were encouraged to speak more frankly and fondly. The feral racism to which some “fans” subjected black players was looked at straight. The power of the penalty – the ultimate in decision-making – was weighed and tactics developed to diminish its terror. Southgate is still defined as much by that missed goal in Euro 96 as by his waistcoats.
I went into Dear England with difficulties. I don’t follow football – though I’ve not avoided it. I’m resistant to nationalism. I am becoming allergic to the word “story” (as in taking control of your own). I have never understood what managers actually do. Graham and Goold won me over. By rousing the blood and raising the stakes. And by making counsel and advice look less wafty, more practical: by showing change being embodied – as the stage is able uniquely to do.
Es Devlin’s design generates excitement before a boot hits the boards. Two great silver hoops define the area of the drama: this stadium looks as if it may take off into outer space. The action is rapid, sped along by movement directors Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf. Characters are quickly, firmly defined: Will Close makes Harry Kane look first lost for words, and later impressively laconic; Darragh Hand goes straight to the heart as Marcus Rashford; and Gina McKee is calmly revolutionary as the psychologist. Yet all hinges on Southgate – on his sense of having failed and his continued ability to aim high. On his being sure and true and modest. Fiennes is utterly convincing. He begins fidgety – arms as busy as a footballer’s feet as he amplifies his phrases with gestures, his hands keeping people and difficulties at bay; he often looks as if he wants to brush cobwebs from his face. The more he pleads for collaboration, the more individual he becomes.
The whoosh of the evening glides over some soft arguments. There is wishful thinking: glory is only really glimpsed with the brief entry of the Lionesses, surely due their own show. Pop-up, penalty-missing politicians are superfluous. There is no point in caricaturing a Boris Johnson, whose wig now looks a miracle of authenticity compared with what is under it. Yet it is true that conversations about what England is and who blokes can be are shifting. On the radio the morning after press day, cricket commentators’ examination of the Test match could have come from Graham’s pen. I wish he would write the script for government.
I was surprised to read that Martin McDonagh found the reviews of The Pillowman “crushing” when it opened at the National 20 years ago. I remember it as turbulent, gleaming, horrific, hilarious and triumphant. Its sense of invention was extreme. Actually, invention is its point. In a totalitarian state, a writer – played in 2003 by David Tennant and now by Lily Allen – is interrogated by police, who detect similarities between her (mostly unpublished) stories and recent maimings and murder of children. Her tales are bleak, bloody and original. The pillowman stalks the play as a modern myth, a creature made of cushions, whose mission is to persuade children on the brink of unhappy lives to kill themselves. The horror is increased by his tempting softness.
Truth wobbles; fibs and fictions interbleed. The writer might have killed her parents; she might have heard them torturing her brother, to whom she tells stories about crucified children and green pigs. The interrogators tease with lies about exactly how they will kill their prisoner.
The Pillowman needs to move like the unconscious: with speed and stealth. Matthew Dunster’s production is too low voltage and deliberate to crackle. When Anna Fleischle’s design, shabby but brightly lit, zooms towards the audience, it does so without menace. Matthew Tennyson’s glazed, damaged brother is arresting but emotionally uncharged. As gruesome cops, Steve Pemberton (lounging) and Paul Kaye (looming) come closest to the high-wire comedy of McDonagh’s needling dialogue. Though nicely taut and nervy, Allen moves only between jumpiness and anger. She reacts but is not consumed by events. A play that should disturb with the wildness of its creation pokes at its audience as if it were a ghost story.
It is a truly dangerous liaison. Theatre and movies, that is. Its perils are proved in The Third Man. Two of the most skilled screenwriters and playwrights, Christopher Hampton and Don Black, have collaborated with one of the most versatile screen composers, George Fenton, to doubly translate Carol Reed’s 1949 film noir: to the stage, as a musical. Trevor Nunn directs. The talent is apparent but threads of charm only expose the loss consequent on shrinking one of the most sinister and far-reaching of films.
Fenton’s score is nonchalantly evocative: a teasing touch of the Harry Lime Theme, an echo of Kurt Weill, lots of woodwind, a swish of waltz, Script and lyrics, not flashy but effective, ease things along with some period notes. Yet characterisation and action are hopelessly cramped. Generic crowds – women with shawls, men in caps – trudge across Paul Farnsworth’s cinder-grey design; the chase scenes are puny. As a particularly wimpy hero, Sam Underwood has a voice buried by anxiety.
The main flash of colour – vocally and visually – comes from Natalie Dunne as a cabaret singer who slinks memorably in Farnsworth’s vivid clinging gowns, along with some bright hoofers in shorts and T-bar shoes. She langorously delivers the evening’s best song in Second Opinion: a slithering melody that advises girls that you never know how hopeless a chap is in bed until you have a point of comparison – preferably more than one. It would be imaginable to remake the whole action through her eyes, as an extended torch song. Lose the literalness: let the many-layered plot hint and swirl. The result may be less flaccid, more fearsome.
Star ratings (out of five)
Dear England ★★★★
The Pillowman ★★★
The Third Man ★★
Dear England is at the Olivier theatre, London, until 11 August
The Pillowman is at the Duke of York’s theatre, London, until 2 September
The Third Man is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 9 September
