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From right to left: Eve (J. Sharkah) and Joyce (S. Marks) are facing fierce
competition and challenges. Source: https://www.parktheatre.co.uk |
Deny, Deny, Deny is Jonathan Maitland’s five-handed drama on professional
athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs.
The story is set in the future and Eve (Juma Sharkah)
is an ambitious sprinter who has come to Shepherd’s Bush in London from a deprived
background in Sierra Leone, to win gold at the 2028 Boston Olympics.
She is already a rising star, ranked 58th
in the running, and to raise her game Eve switches to an unscrupulous and
incredible results-achieving coach called Rona (Zoë Waites), who targets the
athlete’s vulnerability and encourages her towards a radical gene therapy
treatment: a form of DNA refashioning that leaves no detectable traces of
toxins in the bloodstream.
Eve will become the world’s first genetically modified
athlete.
Throughout the process, Rona pits Eve against rival
runner Joyce (Shvorne Marks) and progressively gets her to dump Tom (Daniel
Fraser), her sport journalist boyfriend.
The transformation does not only affect her personal
life, though. Despite Rona’s promise
that injecting RNA drugs is as innocuous as drinking orange juice, Eve can no
longer see the colour green once the drugs take hold. In addition, her eyes start glazing with
robotic intensity during the second act of the play.
Eventually the athlete will succeed. However, is it worth crossing ethical lines
in order to cross winning lines?
The final scene between Tom and Eve may answer to the
question by clearly showing the human cost of Eve’s overriding ambition. She is now a coach herself and has not seen
Tom for several years.
Interesting in Maitland’s play is the set design of a
rectangular sports arena with the audience on all four sides, while the
lighting transforms the arena itself into a running track.
Through short and dynamic scenes the author paints a
saddening portrait of a world in which you are only cheating if you are found
to do so.
The anti-doping enquiry towards the end of the play,
which is conducted quite informally, sees Rona shouting abuse and proclaiming
that cheating is a nationalised industry.
The coach also emphasises:
“Where there is
no doubt, there is no progress.
“Some
of the greatest things in life happen when we cross the line”.
It is in the court scene that Sarah Finigan, who plays
various characters throughout the play, brings new energy and the way she
challenges ruthless Rona is cause for reflection.
Deny, Deny, Deny is a tale of ambition, love and
jealousy which runs at the Park Theatre until December 3.
