Fair Play review – dynamic two-hander tracks gender and race in sport

A pair of talented teenage runners are dangling off the monkey-bars at the side of the athletics track. As they’re joking around and dreaming of the future, Ann (NicK King) tells Sophie (Charlotte Beaumont) that all she wants to do is run. But when she’s classed as having abnormally high levels of testosterone, she’s stripped of the ability to compete.

With clear resonances with Caster Semenya’s story, Fair Play reckons smartly and sharply with the narrow-minded rules of elite sport. But most of Ella Road’s play isn’t about any of this. Soundtracked by squeaking trainers, the majority of this dynamic two-hander sees the two friends just having a good time, doing what they love.

Sophie is cocky and deadpan. Ann’s confidence is slower to arrive, but quickened by Sophie’s certainty in her, and the pair fall easily into a friendship that’s full and alive. As they jog and stretch, they bicker and break into feverish giggles, cackling over boys and dreaming of sponsorships. They seem to fizz when they’re together. Directed by Monique Touko, with scenes marked by little beeps of the starting line, the pace never drops.

From an intimate story about friendship – or is there more between them? – the play zooms outwards. Ann, who is seen to have become too good, too fast, is labelled “abnormal”, with too much testosterone to be able to compete as a woman. Ann’s outrage and pain are tangible when she describes an all-white board deciding who and what she is. In her devastation, and in Sophie’s selfish response, Fair Play throws us into the brutal ignorance and invasiveness of the way elite sport approaches gender, with results that disproportionately impact Black women.

What makes this play remarkable is the way the scale of the political and ethical arguments are held within this pair of teenagers, their legs sick with lactic acid, their minds full of the attention of the press. As the media debates Ann’s body, and her future is narrowed to a fight she didn’t choose, what matters almost as much as the final ruling is whether her friend decides to stand by her side throughout it all.

• At the Bush theatre, London, until 22 January.