Blood and sweat drip to the floor. Tears are on their way. In a small room in Edinburgh, Megan Tomei is cleat-clipped into a stationary bike, yelling above the music as she leads a high-intensity spin class gone wrong. “We take the thing you’re running from,” Tomei shouts, pink lights bouncing off her gleaming shoulders, “and turn it into fuel!” This is SpinQueen™, one of a handful of shows at this year’s fringe demanding epic endurance from their performers through the use of jazzed-up gym equipment. Employing various bikes and a treadmill to authentically illustrate the struggle for success, the pain of failure, and the escape from reality, a profoundly fit group of actors are pushing themselves to their physical limits.
Across the city, Connor Delves’s calves are worth watching. The workout from his cycling-obsessed play, Cadel: Lungs on Legs, is so powerful that people have come up to him after, wanting to touch them. “To make sure they’re real,” says Delves, who cycles a whopping 27km per show. Does he mind this attention? He shrugs. “If they’re OK with getting their hands sweaty, go for it.”
Delves grew up in his parents’ bike shop in Perth, Western Australia. His mum was a triathlete, his dad an international mountain-biker. “It’s always been acting and sport for me,” he says. When he was replaced by a bigger name in a transferring show, he decided to make a production in which he was irreplaceable. “I’d never seen a play that showed endurance sport at its best,” he says, “where the sport is an actual effort.”
In 2016, Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd won the Edinburgh comedy award for Monkey See Monkey Do, an exposing show about toxic masculinity and sexual assault, performed on a treadmill. Two decades before, performance artist Kim Noble pounded away on a treadmill while the other half of their double act, Stuart Silver, played chess against the audience. Over lockdown, Katie Mitchell created eco-theatre show A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, with cyclists generating the show’s lights and sound. But few shows that involve this kind of equipment are about sport, where the exercise is in the story as well as in the doing.
With Cadel, this is what Delves set out to do. The result is a sincere, leg-burning ode to Cadel Evans, the first Aussie to win the Tour de France. Delves performs on a series of the real bikes that Evans used to win the 2011 race, clamped in place. The operation is a family affair: Delves’s father is the show’s mechanic. Head down, Delves’s teardrop-shaped helmet is steady as his legs whir round for the sprint stages. Remarkably riding the same mountain gradients as they do in the Tour, Delves is adept at explaining clearly to the uninitiated how the race works. It’s evident just how tough it is: every stage, every day, every kilometre. “It means you’ve got to think about nutrition,” Delves says of his show. “About sleep.” He quit drinking to train for it. “It means treating acting like being an athlete.”
While Evans’s story is the hero’s arc, The Distance is about the also-rans. “I’m interested in what happens to the legions of sportspeople who are very, very good, but not good enough to make a living from it,” says Ben Norris, the show’s writer and performer, and vocally recognisable as farmer’s son Ben in The Archers. “For every one who wins the Olympics,” he says, “there are at least eight who lose the final. Then 100 or 200 who were in the heats. Then tens of thousands who are very good but don’t get there.” So, he asks, what happens then? “Who are you when the thing to which your identity has been shackled is no longer viable?”
Norris plays Chris, a young boy realising his potential as a cross-country runner and dreaming of competing in the Olympics. The Distance is inspired by Norris’s time as a teenage international long-distance runner, but he worked hard to extricate it from himself. When he was mentored by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she told him: “Be less concerned with being likable.” During each show, he runs roughly 8km on a “geriatric, old, foldable treadmill” that he’s wheeled all over the country. “One time, a local MP helped me on to the train with it,” he says. In Edinburgh, on Summerhall’s main stage, the treadmill is surrounded by a scaffolding pole, which Norris nimbly clambers over as Chris’s success rises and rises – and then begins to fall.
Norris starts running as the audience file into the room. Soon, his clothes are drenched. As he strips down, we see the effort this is taking; his chest heaving, his body glistening. The sweat and ragged breath are important, he explains. “You’re watching it cost something. You’re watching this body really work.” That cost is already making itself evident. Norris pulled his calf in March, then again in April. “I’ve had to start behaving like I’m an elite athlete again, in terms of the rigour of my training and recovery,” he says. “I’m not 18 any more. Everything takes longer on an older body.”
To be fit enough for the show, he has been cross-training, doing strength and conditioning, and phoning friends while on the treadmill to practise speaking at the same time as running at a furious speed. Throughout the fringe, he’s forcing himself to rest. “I’ve done a musical at the fringe and that requires a different kind of discipline. This will be like that, but on steroids.” He frowns. “Although crucially,” he says, “not on steroids.” His one request for accommodation: could he please have a bath?
I want to get a sense of the effort demanded by these shows, so when I talk to Tomei, the creator and performer of SpinQueen™, before the fringe, I suggest we do it on exercise bikes. My thighs soon regret it. “Oh God,” says Tomei, halfway through our chat. “I’m sweating so much.” She is in New York, calling from the spin studio at which she works. I quickly realise how hard it is to speak and ride at the same time.
In SpinQueen™, Tomei plays a heightened, emotionally cracked version of herself as our manic spin instructor, spewing out “toxic positivity” as Tomei calls it, her character obsessed with thinness, optimisation and escape from the quiet that lets thoughts seep in. “Keep pushing, keep starving!” she calls in the show with a too-wide grin. In real life, Tomei is similarly peppy, but without the desperate about-to-fall-apart energy of her character. But that version of herself isn’t a world away, she says; the story’s climax borrows from a traumatic experience she had with an ex. When our narrator won’t allow herself to stop cycling, Tomei says: “It’s a physical representation of her emotional state.”
Sweat is blurring my vision now. “Oh God, no, same,” Tomei tries to reassure me. Every show, she cycles 16km, wanting people to feel the pain her character goes through, emotionally and physically. Tomei started taking spin classes with her dad in high school, and began teaching it as a way to earn money alongside acting. But after running the New York marathon, she got injured. “I had to slow down for the first time in my life,” she says. “I struggled with it, and it made me think of all the standards we hold ourselves to, because of what we think makes us better or successful. It made me think: ‘Why are we killing ourselves trying to reach this standard that can’t be met?’”
What happens if these performers fall or twist an ankle during the fringe? “The same thing as in the Tour de France,” Delves says frankly. “I think that’s part of the allure of this. There’s no understudy.” With her massage gun packed, Tomei is more conscious of the emotional health she needs to maintain across the festival. “Every performance, I’m reliving what happened to me,” she says. “It’s a high-intensity emotional workout too.”
Even when their characters near the dreamed-of success in these shows, failure is only a breath away. One fall, one second behind in a race, one last chance. These plays capture the itch of pushing just that tiny bit harder, as well as the dangers of running on empty. “There’s a little ambition monster within you,” Norris says, “that will wonder if you should just quit everything else and give this one last big go.” You can keep batting it down, he says, but the monster is persistent. “LA Olympics 2028?” Norris muses, only just joking. “Is it too late?”
SpinQueen™ is at Jade Studio at Greenside @ George Street, until 29 August. The Distance, Main Hall at Summerhall, until 31 August. Cadel: Lungs on Legs, Auditorium at Gilded Balloon at the Museum, until 30 August; then Riverside Studios, London, 13 October-15 November
