Review: BERYL, Rose Theatre Kingston,March 8 2016

My father told me about Beryl Burton, the unbeatable female cyclist, but I suspect the only reason he knew about her was because he was also a working-class cyclist in the 50s who rode his bike pretty much everywhere. He stopped the day trips to Blackpool when he went on National Service and learned to drive so, when he came home, he bought the first of a series of rickety secondhand cars.

Beryl did none of those things. She rode on and on and on, acquiring what now looks like a ludicrously eclectic set of titles with World Championships on the road and on the track and a 25-year run as Britain's Best All-Rounder. She held the 12-hour British Time Trial record for two years in the late 60s too - that's the record for men and women.

That all happened long before Chris and Victoria and Bradley and Laura brought the sheen of Olympic Gold into living rooms and Rapha put the chic into cycling, so few know of Beryl's story - one of rags to, well, still rags mainly, at a time when athletes were amateur and fitted sport in around shoots in the Scottish Highlands. Beryl fitted her sport in around washing nappies and pulling rhubarb in the Yorkshire Dales.

This is all told with great warmth in Beryl (at the Rose Theatre, Kingston until 19 March), a play - well, more a show really, as the fourth wall proves about as flimsy as most of Beryl's opponents - by Maxine Peake that captures lots of Yorkshire grit, the stubbornness required to be a champion and the love that kept Beryl and her husband Charlie together for 31 years of her life, cut short at 58 by a heart attack her doctors had warned her about since detecting a heart arrhythmia in childhood.

Samantha Power is feisty but fragile as the unbeatable Beryl, nervous before races, but finishing with arms raised, the applause ringing out. Power (rightly named) pedals furiously on the bikes (on stage, on rollers) and gets the accent so right that I was grateful for the time I spent around Wakefield in the 80s - propah Yarksheere. Rebecca Ryan plays young Beryl and also her daughter Denise, a gifted cyclist herself, with lots of girlish charm. Lee Toomes gives a fine performance as the ever willing Charlie, a man who recognised (perhaps unusually for the time) that his wife was his route to professional and personal fulfilment. Dominic Gately does some decent turns as many other characters injecting plenty of laughs into a piece that does not lack humour.

Peake's script wears its leftish sentiments on its sleeve (there's a jibe or two at David Cameron and no mention of East Germany's dubious sporting heritage when Beryl goes to Leipzig to win Gold), but that's okay with me for a show that's as much tribute as biography. I was more concerned (bike fanboy alert!) about the bikes used on stage, which were very 21st-century aluminium affairs and not the beautiful Reynolds 531 lugged frames with downtube shifters and non-ergonomic handlebars that Beryl rode. (But we did get a glimpse of one at the end - and, my word, was it a beauty.)

This production deserves to be seen by more than just cycling fans, as it sheds much light on a Britain now long gone, even if some of the action takes place in the 80s. Sport isn't like that any more and one hopes that Laura Trott (Beryl's natural successor and perhaps the only woman who might mount a challenge to her for the title of Britain's greatest sportswoman ever) receives more accolades from the public at large to go with the money and medals she already has.

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