Deny, Deny, Deny at Park Theatre, N4

reviewed for The Times, 11 November 2016

Jonathan Maitland is one of the country’s most successful TV journalists and a nationally rated Scrabble player. His second play, An Audience with Jimmy Savile, provoked headlines and helped to put the fledgling Park Theatre in north London on the map. None of that explains why he suddenly seems incapable of writing a script.

Deny Deny Deny is about the morality of doping in sports. Eve (Juma Sharkah), a young black athlete (“Sierra Leone by way of Shepherd’s Bush”), is approached by a glamorous new coach, Rona (the usually superior Zoe Waites). Eve’s boyfriend, Tom (Daniel Fraser), an ethical sports journalist, is wary, but soon she is signed up to Rona’s coaching agenda, which includes near-future variations on gene-editing and a radical new therapy that’s too experimental for sports bodies to have yet banned it.

Rona is a cardboard cut-out of a lesbian Lucifer. Clichés drip from her lips like fool’s gold (“If you don’t take it, you won’t make it”). Towards the end the unfortunate Waites is obliged by Maitland’s script to utter “besides, she’s a whore” as a convincing tribunal argument against Shvorne Marks’s dignified whistleblower and to then try to make such a poor PR decision plausible. Promising sponsors and patrons to Eve if she dopes up, Rona occasionally refers to “my friend with the chequebook”. With a straight face.

The missed opportunity here is to present a sympathetic picture of the temptations of doping and their philosophical justifications. Eve is intended to be our point of access — swapping blueberries and herbal supplements for intravenous injections and wondering about the difference.

If you view all competitive sport as transhumanist in nature, there is a strong case to be made, yet Sharkah seems to undergo a personality transplant during the interval; there is no journey. Meanwhile, there is ponderous sound and cringeworthy sports choreography from John Ross. When Eve’s ability to see colour is damaged, Rona cackles: “As long as you can still see gold.” Tiresome.