From adverts to chocolate bars to hyperbolic commentators London 2012 is ubiquitous, it’s even infiltrating the Crucible with Kate O’Reilly’s sporty little number Leaner, Faster, Stronger in the studio. You might expect the auditorium to be transformed into a stadium given the Olympic connection but instead the audience are cast, not as supporters but as attenders of a conference about bioethics and sport. From this position we can eavesdrop on four fellow delegates – a convenient mix of avaricious sports promoter, earnest genetics researcher, an increasingly inebriated sports psychologist and her freeloading boyfriend.
Over a nifty video projection of a multi-coursed meal they debate, with increasing belligerence and drunkeness, the ethics of genetic enhancement, the commercial exploitation of athletes and what being the best of breed really means. If that all sounds a bit sedentary for a piece commissioned by a Cultural Olympiad programme called iMove, fear not there’s plenty of highly choreographed vignettes to break up the chat. One features a gymnast who’s dedication has reduced her understanding of humans to a series of biological processes, another a boxer fighting his own psyche and another an athlete who has sacrificed everything for a talent slowly deserting him as he ages.
The qualities which sport and theatre should share are elegance, drama and pace, but I can’t help feeling that the rather leaden ‘issues’ which O’Reilly has set herself to address are weighing the performance down and stopping her from achieving a personal best. It never feels truly live, our conference name badges pay lip service to an immersive experience but our really only license to listen to some rather stiff and staged debates. Even in the more dynamic sections the text limps a bit. Christopher Simpson’s single minded runner arguing with his resentful sister uses language so elegiac that it might pass as monologue but could never pretend to be conversation, making her everyday moaning sound equally wooden. An underpowered script means that Simpson’s final appearance as a promethean metaphor has more of bathos than finale.
More successful is Kathryn Dimery’s energetic performance of Ben Addis’s Boxer’s quixotic subconscious – pumping him full of adrenalin one minute and ambushing his focus the next. There’s no denying that O’Reilly tackles some compelling issues, the most complex being the intersection between sporting disability and super-ability. Equally the four actors make up an impressive team but despite their talents you can’t help feeling that the key objectives of some Cultural Olympiad scheme has stifled the drama rather than letting the theatre steal the show.
Leaner, Faster, Stronger was at the Crucible Studio in Sheffield.