A pair of swimming briefs is quite the costume for a professional stage debut, which can feel exposing enough for actors. But appearing on the hottest day of the year, Peaky Blinders’ Finn Cole may well have been relieved to be sporting just the titular trunks of Lucas Hnath’s 2013 play. The mini pool in Anna Fleischle’s striking set, part of an in-the-round design that covers the Orange Tree’s stage, walls and columns in a mosaic of blue, provides an extra opportunity to cool off.
The stillness of that tranquil pool, beneath Sally Ferguson’s shimmering lighting, opposes the increasingly choppy life of Cole’s swimmer, Ray, after performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) are discovered at his club. This threatens his Olympic ambitions but also jeopardises his brother Peter (Ciarán Owens), a lawyer who dreams of stage-managing Ray’s glittering future and is engineering a sponsorship deal with Speedo, as well as Ray’s unnamed Coach (Fraser James), whose reputation is at stake too. Personal fears are intermingled, to varying degrees for each, with moral and ethical questions about PEDs, complicated by the arrival of Ray’s ex, Lydia (Parker Lapaine), a sports therapist recently embroiled in her own scandal.
