Deny, Deny, Deny review – doping play puts sport in the Faust lane - The Guardian

Jonathan Maitland, as a journalist turned playwright, has a knack of tackling topical issues. After An Audience With Jimmy Savile comes his new play about doping in sport. Though it is set in the near future, it posits a plausible scenario about the use of sophisticated gene editing and suffers only from the characters’ tendency to converse in snappy aphorisms.

It takes the form of a Faustian morality play. Eve is a young sprinter who has come to Shepherd’s Bush from Sierra Leone and whose dream is to win gold in the forthcoming Olympics. Despite the doubts of her journalist boyfriend, Tom, she engages a new coach, Rona, who turns out to be a tracksuited Mephistopheles. Rona not only pits her against a rival runner and gets her to dump Tom but advocates the use of injections that change the composition of Eve’s body cells. We wait to see whether Eve, having been assured that the process is “safe, legal and natural”, will succumb to temptation.

Maitland writes well about the dynamics of the coach-athlete relationship, about the overweening nature of Olympic ambitions and about the fact that there is no such thing as a level playing field. “An unfair advantage is what sport is,” says Eve, citing the physical differences between international competitors. But, although Rona claims “I hate talking in headlines”, she constantly speaks as if there is a subeditor at her elbow: “the testers walk, the athletes run”, “cheating is a national industry” and “losing feels worse than winning feels good” are just a few of the handy phrases that rise unbidden to her lips, demanding to be set in 24-point bold. I’d like to hear more about Rona’s background. I also couldn’t believe that an anti-doping inquiry would be conducted as informally as it is here, with Rona shouting abuse from the sidelines.

Zoe Waites (Rona) and Juma Sharkah (Eve) in Deny, Deny, Deny. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

But Maitland clearly understands the imperatives that drive young athletes and the sacrifices they are willing to make: Rona quotes the research of a medical pro, Robert Goldman, who found that half the athletes questioned would take an undetectable performance-enhancing pill even if meant they would die in five years’ time. Behind the play lurks the big question of whether sport, athletics especially, loses its point when skill is superseded by scientific artifice.

Brendan O’Hea’s production skilfully uses a virtually bare stage to evoke the world of Olympic competition: a rotating plastic chair at one point becomes a winners’ podium. Zoe Waites invests Rona with the devilish charisma and dodgy logic that you feel might tempt the gullible. There are also good performances from Juma Sharkah as the single-minded Eve, Shvorne Marks as her more cynical rival and Daniel Fraser as the doubting Tom. Even if the play, stylistically, reveals Maitland’s journalistic origins, it also shows a reporter’s hungry curiosity about the endemic corruption in international sport.

• At Park theatre, London, until 3 December. Box office: 020-7870 6876.

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