A 2020s companion piece to ‘Jerusalem’? Dear England is a rousing play spotlighting the nuances of national identity, pride and place.
As it stands, every roundabout I’ve recently passed has had a St George’s flag flying. Patriotism is a divisive subject; but Englishness, in particular, has become entangled with extremist rhetoric and nostalgic fantasies of power. That red cross carries a weight far heavier than sport.
So what is Englishness? It’s a question without an easy answer and James Graham’s Dear England knows that. What it offers instead is openness, curiosity and a willingness to sit with contradiction.
1966’s World Cup win looms large; half a century later, we’re watching a team changing itself from within. Gareth Southgate is foregrounding mental health, reframing failure and starting conversations around prejudice in the dressing room. It’s also a decade since Brexit, a lingering wound that has worsened xenophobia and further distorted the English flag. Politics and football have always been intertwined, and Dear England makes that relationship explicit. With another World Cup approaching, its timing feels uncanny.
The play is an underdog story rooted in patience rather than bravado. Southgate (performed with rousing conviction by David Sturzaker), challenges the entrenched ‘man up’ culture of sport, aided by psychologist Pippa Grange (played sensitively by Samantha Womack). Time loops are everywhere – most notably in Southgate’s own missed penalty at the 1996 Euros, an act that earned him years of public scorn. It takes someone hurt by the system, the play suggests, to stand up to it and enact meaningful change.
Before the interval, I found myself thinking that Dear England could be read as a contemporary companion to Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Not least for all the rave reviews, but because the 2009 play interrogates Englishness through folkloric collective culture. Can we ever escape allegories of national greatness – medieval legends, holy grails, lions – when they continue to manifest across society, including on the football pitch?
When Dear England’s second act begins, the parallel sharpens with Morris dancers and St. George himself charging forward. These symbols of enduring Englishness collide with militaristic language of Waterloo and crusades. It’s all bolstered by a soundtrack that taps directly into the national psyche: Bittersweet Symphony, Introvert, Sweet Caroline, tracks belonging to our matches, pubs, adverts and carry an elevated sense of possibility.
In Jerusalem, Johnny Byron’s run-down caravan is a sacred mainstay in the face of local authority. In Dear England, players speak about the ‘shithole’ towns they come from with steadfast loyalty. This identifying pride of place is central to how Englishness is lived and felt, across the whole socio-economic experience. Graham’s refusal to offer easy answers feels deliberate – continuing a theatrical conversation about Englishness that Jerusalem so forcefully ignited.
Pippa later questions the Lions’ imperiousness. Why do we take penalties so quickly? Why does the squad feel it’s owed a win? It’s an inherited sense of deservingness – the residue of a small country that once invaded the world and still believes, at some level, in its own exceptionalism. The persistent, unbudging stuff of Arthurian legends.
Towards the end of the play, there’s a sharp tone shift when the Lionesses’ Euro trophy is carried onstage by Natalie Boakye. The audience erupted in cheers. And then the moment passes. Perhaps this fleeting acknowledgement reveals the limits of football’s progress narrative: genuine attempts at equality undercut by the persistent sense that the game, and its myths , still belong to men.
Ending the play here might have offered a sharp sociopolitical charge. Instead, we return to the changing room: ‘You’ll get ’em next time, boys’ kind of thing. We know the hunger remains for a second star on the shirts, a feeling of greatness and a version of Englishness that still promises to make us feel mighty.