James Graham’s entertaining new play looks at the England manager’s job. Everyone knows that coaching the national side is just a hobby. The boss picks the squad for a handful of fixtures each year and gives a pep talk at half-time followed by a post-match press conference. He’s spared the bother of speculating in the transfer market and he’s never troubled by verbal monsterings from foreign owners or irascible chairmen. And no salary ought to be paid because the incumbent is assured large earnings as a public speaker.

Graham’s play opens in 2016 with the appointment of Gareth Southgate, a dreamy weirdo from Sussex. Southgate was one of the best players Germany ever had. At Euro 96, he missed his kick during the penalty shoot-out and propelled the Germans into the finals which they won. He treats the England job as a chance to purge this awful memory from his tortured soul. A colossal blunder, as it turns out.

To deal with his players’ anxieties over penalties he keeps emphasising the emotion he wants to eradicate. Fear, fear, fear. He bangs on about it constantly. He’s helped by a nutty spiritualist, Doctor Pippa, who claims to be a woman of science but who spouts manifest absurdities. ‘Fear can cause your IQ to drop by 15 points,’ she says without offering evidence for this dotty assertion.

Under the regime of Southgate and Doctor Pippa, the team invest their time in navel-gazing exercises and emotional ruminations. Instead of practising football they fill up notepads with giddy jottings about their feelings. Transformed into a crew of simpering bridesmaids, they duly flop at tournament after tournament. They’re defeated in the world cups of 2018 and 2022. And in the final of Euro 2020 they play Italy to a 1-1 draw, so the match goes to penalties. The bridesmaids lose again.

Whenever Southgate hands victory to a foreign side he’s rewarded with a new contract. Which probably explains England’s continued failure. They want to win but they don’t need to. Southgate’s great success as a scam-artist is overlooked by this play, which treats him as a noble, damaged hero. But Graham’s writing never delves into his mind and explains what drives him.

Perhaps there’s nothing there to delve into. Joseph Fiennes centres his performance around Southgate’s puzzled frown which he occasionally deepens into an anguished grimace. There’s not much else to see. England stars like Wayne Rooney and Harry Kane are given walk-on roles as bumbling halfwits. But these caricatures feel out of place in a Graham play. He’s a highly sympathetic writer who rarely indulges in facile mockery.

And yet the comedy works well. At press-night, the crowd collapsed in hysterics each time Kane opened his mouth. The easy laughs may be the responsibility of director Rupert Goold, who likes to lay on big crowd-pleasing carnivals. His mastery is on full display here as he uses the Olivier’s vast spaces to deliver a series of stunning visual and physical effects. There are enjoyable cameos from Gary Lineker, Sam Allardyce, Sven-Goran Eriksson, Greg Dyke and even Theresa May. The whole thing is terrific fun. And if you happen to regard footballers as clueless, overpaid dolts it’s even better.

Tambo & Bones is a disturbing political spoof imported from America. The first half consists of a laboured comedy routine by two tramps, Tambo and Bones, who enjoy scamming money from strangers. Both are morally vacant narcissists but their attitudes to life are very different. Tambo is a pretentious revolutionary who wants to defeat ‘white tyranny’. Bones is a gluttonous buffoon who dreams of becoming a rap artist. Their ambitions are realised. Both become billionaire super-stars.

Civil war breaks out across America as the non-white races unite to wipe out Caucasians. Mass murder is desirable, according to the philosophising Tambo, in order to eradicate the evil of racism which is the sole responsibility of white people. The show doesn’t hold back on the ‘white genocide’ motif. Recordings are played of victims being machine-gunned as they plead for their lives. And for extra emphasis, Tambo and Bones beat two white characters to death with fire extinguishers.

It’s an odd experience to sit in a theatre and see the annihilation of one’s own kind being presented on stage while members of the audience giggle and celebrate. The show’s criminal rhetoric and its incitement to violence are plainly illegal but the authorities are unlikely to act. Homicidal bigotry is cool as long as the targets aren’t ethnic minorities. White people often hear the accusation that they alone created racism and spread it around the world. And that falsehood is never challenged because it seems like a harmless delusion. This play warns otherwise. Anyone who claims that ‘whites invented racism’ is characterising white people as pollutants disguised as human beings. Rhetoric of that sort is a necessary precursor to genocide.