As the Summer Olympics approach, the UK première of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond comes with timely prescience of the almost inevitable doping scandals that will mar the event.
Ethical issues float around but without detailed exposition
The play launches in at the deep end with the discovery of performance-enhancing drugs in the swimming club’s refrigerator. It could be a play that poses serious moral questions that create dilemmas all round. Indeed they are there, but the treatment lacks depth and with the exception of a couple of impassioned speeches the manoeuvrings around the situation seem mostly concerned with heightening the comedy. Ethical issues float around but without detailed exposition and neither the script nor Matthew Dunster’s direction lives up to the play’s billing as a thriller.
Finn Cole (best known for his roles as Michael Gray in Peaky Blinders and Joshua ‘J’ Cody in Animal Kingdom), perhaps surprisingly at the age of 28, makes his professional stage debut as Ray, a somewhat dim-witted, exceptional swimmer who stands on the brink of selection for the Olympic team and, if he changes trainer, a lucrative sponsorship deal. Portraying a young man detached from reality with a level of naivety that often amounts to stupidity, seems to leave Cole detached and not fully at ease with the role.
In contrast, Ciarán Owens (also Peaky Blinders), gives an animated performance as Peter, a lawyer of flexible principles and Ray’s older brother and manager. His rapid-fire conversations are often prefaced or interspersed with a raging monologue filled with truncated lines that suggest a loss for words or a sudden change of tack.The script is easily envisaged with its half-formed sentences and rows of dots as the idea falls off and the next one picks up, but the device often sounds like fumbling.
Between these two comes the considered performance of Fraser James, known only as Coach, the trainer and mentor who increasingly becomes the investigator. He remains calm in the crises and seems to have a firm hold on ethics, which is why his about-face at the end lacks a certain level of credibility.
To answer, “Where did the drugs come from?” Parker Lapaine, also making her stage debut, convincingly plays Lydia, a girl with whom Ryan has failed romantically and who has escaped from her former role as a supplier. The link is there, but the love story is hardly necessary and something of a diversion from the main issue.
Given the level at which Ray is competing and the number of events in which he participates, it’s incredible that at no stage in the story do the authorities carry out a drugs test. Of course, that would throw a spanner into the works sufficient to require a rewrite, but it is a niggling issue. Really annoying, however, is the ear-splittingly loud horn from sound designer Holly Khan that marks each scene change and is at odds with the pleasing set designer by Anna Fleischle who along with lighting designer Sally Ferguson has converted the theatre into a shimmering natatorium complete with a small sunken pool and stainless steel steps.
It all ends rather mysteriously with an unconvincing fight scene directed by Claire Llewellyn as Roy Orbison reprises, Anything you want, you got it, which, as far as i could tell, remains a pipe dream for Ray.
