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.
Red Speedo’s UK premiere has been cannily scheduled alongside the Paris Games. The potency of its debate is further boosted by the ongoing doping row about Chinese swimmers at the 2021 Olympics and the prospect next summer of the Enhanced Games, featuring former world champion swimmer James Magnussen, where PEDs will be actively encouraged.
Hnath’s principal thesis is that a level playing field in sports is near impossible due to multiple socioeconomic factors giving unfair advantages before competitors have even begun training. Peter is obsessed with future-proofing his daughter by sending her to private school; Ray would not be where he is without the free sessions Coach gave to his family.
Roy Orbison’s You Got It bookends the drama, its silky tones sounding suffocating in light of Peter’s dubious insistence of brotherly love. The balance of the play’s symbiotic relationships is precarious: acts of self-preservation constantly threaten the quid pro quo. It is Ray who wears a giant, twisting sea serpent tattoo on his back, but each character displays a slippery instinct. One minute Coach is gently manipulating Ray, the next Peter is directly threatening Coach. First seen aggrandising Ray like a salesman, Owens veers from Mamet-speak to a bullish sourness redolent of Neil LaBute’s writing, though the play’s comic tone is halting.
The drama gathers some pace and tension from Holly Khan’s sound: propulsive drumming in between scenes and an intermittent alarm that resembles an extended starter buzzer. But the stakes do not feel high enough in the final stretch, which could be ratcheted up, and Hnath raises intriguing themes without fully probing them. The position of the pool on stage and the actors’ blocking also obscure some exchanges.
Nevertheless, Matthew Dunster’s production is well acted across the board. “Things wash over you,” Lydia tells Ray, and Cole has the right unreadable blankness as a young man who is not as bright as his character’s name suggests. Played at 90 minutes without an interval, it stings like chlorine but I’d have appreciated some extra laps with these characters.
At the Orange Tree theatre, London, until 10 August
