If there’s a drama at your local leisure centre it’s probably no more than lane rage in the pool or a fierce game of badminton. But the theatre company Dante or Die are currently touring a play to sports centres around the UK, staging the action in changing rooms, aerobics studios, on treadmills and even in swimming pools – drawing on help from more than 50 volunteers as cast and crew.
Director Daphna Attias, who co-founded Dante or Die with Terry O’Donovan, says the idea for their show Take On Me came after they went to an 80s-built leisure centre in east London that was about to be demolished. They then visited centres around the country and spoke to the people who worked – and worked out – in them. “What’s really special about a lot of those community leisure centres,” says Attias, “is that they are places that create unexpected relationships.”
They heard of friendships born through postnatal yoga classes and people making new starts by joining aqua aerobics. Attias and O’Donovan became intrigued by the idea of fitness centres as places where you “try to become a better version of yourself”. The play’s title comes from A-ha’s hit single and reflects both the competitive nature of sport and the vulnerable but blossoming relationships in the plot. It’s a moving, funny and ultimately joyful show about life at the deep end. While the setting is familiar, it has perhaps been under-explored dramatically since the 90s BBC1 sitcom The Brittas Empire, starring Chris Barrie as a beleaguered leisure centre manager.
Andrew Muir’s script for Take On Me explores crises of confidence and discoveries of both self and sexuality. It concentrates on two characters: a lifeguard who has never saved anyone and a widow who has newly joined the centre and has emotional reasons for not braving the pool. The show was first made in 2016 after the company won a commission from Farnham Maltings and Arts Partnership Surrey to create a work that would “reach people who don’t regularly engage with the arts”. It was put on in leisure centres in Surrey that year and has now been reworked for a tour that opened in Poole, Dorset, last weekend and will visit Norfolk, Kent, Salford, London and Reading.
Take On Me is not only drawing an audience who are new to theatre but also giving roles to volunteers who haven’t acted before. Members of the public are invited to play participants in an aerobics class, perform with the choir and dress up as 80s film heroes and as famous actors. By the end of the tour, the play will have been performed with six different casts and creative teams, each numbering 50 or more.
The play is set in the 1980s, as a nod not only to the east London leisure centre that inspired it but also to the wave of other centres that opened in the UK that decade – and to the fitness boom epitomised by Jane Fonda’s workout videos. Take On Me’s audience are divided into two teams and given different coloured John McEnroe-style headbands to wear. They are then separately led around the centre by a pair of troubadour angels (George Hicks in a tuxedo jacket, playing the ukulele, and Eleanor Isherwood in a spangly dress with a giant hair bow and a keytar).
Every performance has integrated BSL communication from Sophie Gunn, whose sign language is seamlessly interwoven with dance moves to 80s classics, such as Olivia Newton-John’s Physical. “Sophie was a community participant in Surrey,” says Attias. “She has two deaf parents. They were coming to see the show and she asked if they could have a BSL communicator for a day. We quickly tried to integrate the communicator into the show. It sparked us into thinking about how we could make it more a part of our work.”
Most of the play’s interlinked episodes are played out twice, as they are watched separately by the two audience groups who become spectators in rooms where they are usually active. One sequence, performed on a treadmill with several volunteers, features choreography that no personal trainer would ever advise and changes at each location because “we’ve had very different bodies to work with”. The script, too, is altered to suit each location’s volunteers and to make specific references to each centre where it is staged.
Dante or Die’s ethos is to use non-theatre spaces and show them in a new light. Their show I Do was staged in hotel rooms and Handle With Care took place in self-storage units. “We like working sites as opposed to taking a big warehouse and transforming it into something else,” says Attias. “We want to enable the people who use it regularly to see it differently.” As they were preparing the show they found that they very rarely had exclusive access to each leisure centre, so they would be asking people showering in the changing rooms if they minded awfully if the company’s musicians could come in and rehearse some songs.
Does Attias regularly visit a leisure centre herself? “After we finished the dress rehearsal last week, I woke up in the morning and my kids said: ‘We want to go swimming, Mummy!’” She screams with laughter, recalling her response. “Not again!”
Take On Me is at Alive Oasis Leisure Centre, Hunstanton, Norfolk, 23-25 November, then on tour until 3 March
