In a significant year for the National Theatre, James Graham’s Dear England has been one of its biggest successes with sellout and critically acclaimed runs on the Southbank followed by a rapid West End transfer which completed its run at the Prince Edward Theatre last week, the first play at the venue for 75 years. On 25 January even great numbers of people will be able to see it as the NT Live recording hits cinemas, ahead of which Tottenham Hotspur Stadium hosted a preview screening in its newly refurbished press briefing room.
To an invited audience of young people from local theatre groups from Haringey and Enfield, only one person in the room had seen the play on stage and this National Theatre partnership screening with the football club began with a 30-minute Q&A involving actor Will Fletcher who played Jordan Henderson and sound designer Dan Balfour who talked in detail about the creative process and the impact of the production on those who wouldn’t normally go to the theatre.
Part of NT Live’s wider outreach programme, there are plans to screen the performance not only in major cinemas across the UK and internationally but in community halls and places with limited access to either theatres or local cinemas, maximising its reach. Fletcher noted the impact on school and youth groups who come to see the play and the panel reflected more broadly on the shared nature of storytelling and narrative between football and theatre as well as the expectation, the hype that goes hand-in-hand with supporting the national team.
Those themes and the implications for national identity are writ large in the transfer of Graham’s play to the big screen with the constant pressure placed on the young players to live up to all of those complex expectations without really knowing what their ‘Englishness’ should mean. The advantage of an NT Live screening are the close-ups and careful screen direction that emphasises the weight of history on their shoulders.
Fletcher explained the highly collaborative development of the production with plenty of open discussion about script development, the possibility of several different endings and lots of “seeing what happened” in the rehearsal room based on the actors’ research. The outcome, Fletcher hopes, is that audiences will think differently about their own relationship with and reactions to the England team in a future tournament.
NT Live audiences can also appreciate the technical complexity of the show, its use of sound to imply goal scoring and penalty misses as well as celebrating known football anthems. It successfully captures the emotion of being at a game, the expectant babble of the stadium and the intimacy of the player’s own perspective which Balfour explained also emerged from the instinctual and iterative process of rehearsal.
This live performance of Dear England was captured at the Olivier Theatre with its original cast during its summer run and now audiences get to relive the passion and pain of being an England fan in the last eight years, even if they’ve never been to a theatre before. The gripped silence in the Tottenham Hotspur press room across nearly three hours of film suggests that, whether on stage or screen, this play has finally found a story about English football that everyone wants to believe in.
Dear England is screening in cinemas on 25 January
