Review: CADEL: LUNGS ON LEGS, Riverside Studios

Professional cycling is a beautiful sport. Many viewers tune into its sensational TV coverage explicitly for the vistas of iconic European landscapes that provide the backdrop to the races, the Ligurian coast, the Alpine passes, the Champs-Élysées. In person, watching a peloton flash by, silent but for the whirr of the chainset, colourful in lycra, pursued by team cars, four wheels for once ceding authority to two, is also therapeutic if fleeting.

As the proliferation of access to on-bike cameras and radio playback in recent years has shown, up close and personal, it’s a rather more visceral experience. Crashes abound, the road ramps up and gravity is your enemy, the road ramps down and gravity is your enemy again, pushing you ever closer to trees, walls, and sheer drops at anything up to 100kmh. Cycling needs cojones.

And there’s perhaps the greatest enemy of all - time itself. Six or more hours on the bike, day after day, in a Grand Tour, a new soulless hotel room every night, repeated dinners and meetings with teammates who might not be pulling for you. All that space to be filled; all that self doubt you’re holding back… just. 

It’s theatre uniquely that can get up close and personal to catch that physical and psychological strain, the sweat standing out on the forehead, the shirts soaked and the confessions, the fears, the gnawing, gnawing, gnawing internal monologue that won’t go away. With no screen to mediate the message, no director pointing our attention this way and that, all we have is the man and the machine, both working on the edge. As is always true of the best of sport, the best of theatre happens when there is no hiding place.

You get all that and more from Connor Delves (who wrote the show with Steve McMahon) telling Cadel’s story from a bike on rollers with an impressive video projection behind him displaying some of that landscape mentioned above. We’re not quite on a tandem with him, but we’re close enough to be one of the peloton.

Probably wisely given the somewhat unusual, if not quite unprecedented, sight of an actor pedalling through the 70 minutes runtime, the story plays out in a conventionally linear style.

We see the boy becoming obsessed with cycling despite moving frequently from Bush to city and back to Bush again. The first turning point comes in his assessment at the fabled Australian Institute of Sport, where the shy, slightly awkward, 18 year-old is found to have a VO2 max rating at the very end of the bell curve. That is what pro cyclists need, as it is the endurance engine that gets them through three weeks of continual effort. Cadel had it naturally - others, including some who beat him - boosted it through doping, EPO the infamous drug of choice, enhanced haematocrit the, sometimes near fatal, result.

Nothing comes easy to him - well, the dice were loaded much of the time after all - and it takes him until 34 years of age to get past the near misses, the fish out of water status of an Aussie in what was still a very Continental sport and his own questioning as to whether he really has what it takes. Of course, he does come through  - we wouldn’t really have a play if not!

In his 100th performance, Delves remains a huge physical and psychological presence on stage. You really do feel those eponymous lungs burning, wonder with him if it’s time to call it a day and marvel at the madness of it all. Delves trained hard for the role and you can see it before your very eyes.

We finish with Delves lipsynching to Cadel’s victory speech, in halting French and then halting English, Cadel never at ease in front of the media. And, though that makes sense dramatically, it misses some of the work this most singular of sporting heroes has undertaken since. 

That is but a quibble because the show will bring back wonderful memories for cycling fans, inject some much missed sun into the lives of ex-pat Aussies facing into the English winter and offer a unique theatrical experience for those who want to see a good story told with heart, mind and, yes, lungs too.

Read the BWW interview with Connor Delves

Cadel: Lungs On Legs is at the Riverside Studios Hammersmith until 15 November

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