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. 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. Does he mind this attention? His mum was a triathlete, his dad an international mountain-biker.
When he was replaced by a bigger name in a transferring show, he decided to make a production in which he was irreplaceable. 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. Then 100 or 200 who were in the heats.
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