[title]
If you believe Bart Simpson and Shaggy the best response to getting in hot water is 'It wasn't me'. The title of Jonathan Maitland's unsubtle new drama suggests that athletes feel the same way: a pushy coach tells her charge to 'Deny, Deny, Deny' accusations of doping, as prying journalists threaten to tarnish her gold medal.
Not that sprinter Eve really thinks she’s doing anything wrong. A convincingly peppy Juma Sharkah plays this aspiring athlete, who starts out relying on blueberries and her boyfriend Tom's moral support to put a spring in her step. But her new coach Rona (a fantastically OTT Zoe Waites, who’s only a shiny cape away from playing a panto villain) has teamed up with a rogue scientist to give her an experimental, semi-legal 'gene-editing' treatment. As Eve zips ahead, Tom’s left behind. But as his job for hilariously named website called thetruthaboutsport.com might suggest, he's keeping a close eye out for any funny business.
Jonathan Maitland’s a former news journalist, who’s previously turned his hand to plays about Thatcher (‘Dead Sheep’) and Jimmy Savile (‘An Audience With Jimmy Savile’). So unsurprisingly this play is stuffed full of research, with nuggets about how 1920s footballers took hormones from monkeys' balls or how modern scientists use generics to evade sport doping laws. But its insights into how a bunch of women athletes might actually talk or interact with each other doesn't feel researched at all. Eve and her training mate hurl playground insults like 'pig' or 'whore' at each other. And Rona’s speeches are shoved full of campy Biblical references. A particular lowlight for plausibility and taste is when she derails Eve's trial with a crude rant about how transgender people shouldn't do sports, with a disappointingly high proportion of the audience laughing along.
Brendan O’Hea’s sharp direction does a lot to keep Maitland’s hammy dialogue whizzing along, and Polly Sullivan’s striking set design puts us straight into the strip-lit world of gyms and arenas. It’s a fittingly stark setting for Eve’s descent from naïve idealism to career hell. But after all this denying, denying, denying, Maitland's simplistic drama neaves us nothing more complex to chew on than the old-fashioned saying: ‘Cheats never prosper’.