Fair Play review: complex, intelligent look at gender and athletics

Ella Road’s latest play looks at the friendship between young athletes
NicK King and Charlotte Beaumont
Ali Wright
Farah Najib9 December 2021

What makes a woman? Is it being blessed with a pair of double-D boobs? Whether or not you menstruate? How much oestrogen you’ve got pumping through your blood? Or is it how fast you can - or perhaps more significantly, can’t - run?

These are the questions posed by Ella Road’s Fair Play, which follows the blooming yet tumultuous friendship between young athletes Sophie (Charlotte Beaumont) and Ann (NicK King). When Ann joins Sophie’s running club, she is quickly launched into a world that thrives on discipline and total tunnel vision.

The evolution of the protagonists’ union is a thing of joy. From initial tentative iciness grows a pure, undiluted friendship that manages - at least for a time - to remain untainted by the pressures of the gruelling and competitive world they inhabit. Beaumont and King’s performances are totally organic and refreshingly natural, allowing us to invest wholeheartedly in the chemistry that hums between them. Beaumont’s Sophie is like a puppy; with sing-song giggles she bounds across the stage with bundles of energy, fawning over Ann and finding reasons to touch her affectionately. This is no simple love story, though. The text frequently and cleverly leads its audience down rabbit holes, until the true, darker questions of the play - of privilege, discrimination, and bodily betrayal - reveal themselves.

Road’s script deftly interweaves content and form, with each scene feeling like a kind of race in itself. Monique Touko’s dynamic and appropriately fast-paced direction does well to reflect this; moments bowl along with barely a breath between them. In this way, Sophie and Ann’s world is reflected - the production itself an act of stamina and endurance. Indeed, energetic movement direction from Joseph Toonga and Orin ‘oriyo’ Norbert has the characters constantly in motion: circling one another, pulling together and springing apart, climbing and swinging on metal frames (purposefully sparse yet effective set design by Naomi Dawson). Scene transitions are punctuated by explosive drills of squats, burpees and sprints that leave me pondering on my fitness levels.

Ultimately, the inevitable happens: Ann and Sophie are placed directly in competition with one another. The simplicity of their camaraderie is polluted, possibly irreparably, by powers much bigger than them - and Ann must pay the price. King portrays the character’s crumbling with strength and sensitivity, delivering a powerful monologue that has audience members clicking their fingers in fervent agreement.

Road lays out a complex topic with intelligence and nuance, if occasionally verging on the didactic. Fair Play paints a rich, three-dimensional picture of the banal and senseless definitions that are placed on women not only on the track, but within a society that has prejudice running through its veins.

Bush Theatre, until Jan 22; bushtheatre.co.uk

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