Biff! Bosh! Ryan Fletcher and Taqi Nazeer go head to head in "Beautiful Burnout" Pic: Gavin Evans
All sport is theatre of a sort, and boxing, with its intense focus on a small, brightly lit space and its brutal physical encounters perhaps more than most. Roy Williams’s Sucker Punch has just finished a much admired run at the Royal Court. This year’s Fringe has two other boxing shows in addition to this one, a co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and physical theatre specialists Frantic Assembly.
With characters like Benny Lynch and Ken Buchanan in its heritage, not to mention current pretenders such as Craig McEwan, (whose regular blog you can read here on stv.tv) Scotland has always had a special place in its heart for the wee wiry guys who fight their way out of modest beginnings to take on the world.
In fact so familiar is that story arc that writer Bryony Lavery and director Steve Hogget and Scott Graham seem to have deliberately avoided it. Here the action focuses entirely on the gym and the ring. The only outside character is the mother of one of the boys in training.
Lorraine McIntosh, late of Deacon Blue but best known as Alice in River City, does her best to give life to the conflicting emotions of seeing her son put himself at risk but also responding to the visceral excitement of it all. But her role is only sketchily written. It's one of several opportunities which slip through the fingers of a show which dances around its subject with all the fleetness of Muhammad Ali without ever quite landing the killer blow.
You can’t fault the physical commitment of the actors and the actual boxing, of which there is a fair amount, is about as credible as it could be, given the actors have to do it every night. There are some characteristic Frantic Assembly movement moments where the slow motion poetry of the physical endeavour is caught against the electronic soundtrack by Underworld.
The burnout of the title turns out to be not the familiar slow descent into booze and drugs after the championships have been won, but the abrupt and terrible brain damage that Cameron Burns (Ryan Fletcher) sustains in the climatic fight with his old training partner Ajay Chopra (Taqi Nazeer) .
But while Cameron is the one we are most invited to invest in (it’s his mother that we meet) the only really convincing character turns out to be the grizzled trainer, nicely caught by Ewan Stewart. His names is Burgess I couldn't help wondering if that was a covert tribute to the late Burgess Meredith who played the grizzled trainer Mickey in all the Rocky films. It woudl be fitting.
Beautiful Burnout is a National Theatre of Scotland production at the Pleasance on the Edinburgh Fringe. It will be touring Scotland and England in the autumn.
