Orange Tree theatre, London
Finn Cole plays swimmer Ray, whose life enters choppy waters when performance-enhancing drugs are discovered at his club

A pair of swimming briefs is quite the costume for a professional stage debut, which can feel exposing enough for actors. But appearing on the hottest day of the year, Peaky Blinders’ Finn Cole may well have been relieved to be sporting just the titular trunks of Lucas Hnath’s 2013 play. The mini pool in Anna Fleischle’s striking set, part of an in-the-round design that covers the Orange Tree’s stage, walls and columns in a mosaic of blue, provides an extra opportunity to cool off.

The stillness of that tranquil pool, beneath Sally Ferguson’s shimmering lighting, opposes the increasingly choppy life of Cole’s swimmer, Ray, after performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) are discovered at his club. This threatens his Olympic ambitions but also jeopardises his brother Peter (Ciarán Owens), a lawyer who dreams of stage-managing Ray’s glittering future and is engineering a sponsorship deal with Speedo, as well as Ray’s unnamed Coach (Fraser James), whose reputation is at stake too. Personal fears are intermingled, to varying degrees for each, with moral and ethical questions about PEDs, complicated by the arrival of Ray’s ex, Lydia (Parker Lapaine), a sports therapist recently embroiled in her own scandal.

The French choreographer took over Bausch’s dance company in 2022. He never met his hero, but explains how their histories have entwined

In 2023, the German choreographer Pina Bausch’s groundbreaking company Tanztheater Wuppertal celebrated its 50th birthday. So too did its current leader, Boris Charmatz, born in the French Alpine town of Chambéry in the year Bausch took over a ballet company in North Rhine-Westphalia and renamed it for her dreamlike dance theatre.

Charmatz is acutely aware that he is still catching up on a half century of Wuppertal history. It is partly why the choreographer is also dancing in his own ambitious reframing of Bausch’s agonising signature work, Café Müller, presented six times by different casts alongside interludes with company members, in a stunning seven-hour event at the Avignon festival, where we meet backstage. (He is Avignon’s artiste complice this year, presenting several of his productions.)