The clocks are set. The line is drawn. They’ve got a chance to be champions. But at what cost?
When Ann joins Sophie’s running club she’s thrown into a world of regimented training and pure focus. The two girls couldn’t be more different, but soon their shared passion makes them inseparable – dreaming in lanes and lap-times, waking up picturing Olympic medals, each day stronger and faster…
But set head to head in the run up to the World Championships, they find themselves and their friendship put to the ultimate test. As their relationships, their bodies, and their very identities are pulled into public scrutiny, does being exceptional come at too high a price?
A gripping exploration of the underside of women’s athletics, Fair Play is the new work from Ella Road (The Phlebotomist) – “the most promising young playwright in Britain” (The Telegraph).
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Ella is a writer and actor from London. Her debut play The Phlebotomist went on at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs in 2018 before transferring to the Main Stage in 2019. It was nominated for an Olivier Award and was also a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Ella is now working on new comissions for the Almeida Theatre, Bush Theatre and Hampstead Theatre, and her play How to Eat An Elephant will premier at Theatre Royal Plymouth in 2020.
She is currently developing original TV projects with Drama Republic for Channel 4, and Element Pictures for the BBC, and recently wrote the short film Something Will Disappear for the Almeida for the Artists Climate Action Network. Ella was lucky enough to be a Soho Young Writer 2017/18 and one of the Bush Theatre’s Emerging Writers 2018/19. Ella is co-founder of Flux Theatre, which aims to support new voices in the arts. She also teaches playwriting for Synergy Theatre.
