TheatreIt took months of training to get the actors in shape for Beautiful Burnout. It was a big Edinburgh hit, but will it work in a real boxing venue? By Laura BarnettOf the thousands of shows that hit the Edinburgh fringe every year, only a handful end up making a real stir beyond the festival. This August, one such stand-out was Beautiful Burnout, a new play by Bryony Lavery about five teenage Glaswegians who are desperate to become professional boxers. With an innovative set – the audience sat around a revolving boxing ring – and a pulsing soundtrack courtesy of dance-music pioneers Underworld, the play sent long queues snaking round the converted gym in which it was staged, and was universally well reviewed.
A co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland, who were also behind the 2007 mega-hit Black Watch, and the theatre company Frantic Assembly, Beautiful Burnout has taken its high-energy mix of theatre, dance and music out on tour. The show hit Glasgow a fortnight ago, and has now pitched up in east London, in what is undoubtedly the most authentic and atmospheric venue of its eight-week tour: York Hall, one of Britain's best-known boxing venues.
It's the first time that the hall – in which, next month, four heavyweights will go fist-to-fist for the title of Prize Fighter ("No guts – no glory", warns the website) – has been used as a theatre. In the high-ceilinged main arena, the usual boxing ring has been confined to a cupboard; in its place, a crew of technicians is assembling the play's revolving stage, video wall, and banks of tiered seating. "There's a swimming pool under the floor," Lisa Maguire, Frantic Assembly's producer, points out, "but we don't think the floor is going to collapse. At least, we hope it won't."
Over in the boxers' changing rooms, there is a striking absence of glamour: the paint is flaking off the walls, the floor is made of wipe-down tiles, and there's a shower cubicle in the middle of the room. But it's the kind of place that directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett – who, as well as co-founding Frantic Assembly with Graham in 1994, is also responsible for Black Watch's top-notch choreography – have become used to frequenting since, around a year ago, they first decided to try making a play about boxing. "I'd gone to New York for the second tour of Black Watch," Hoggett explains. "There was no shower at the theatre, so the cast were going to Gleason's, a famous boxing gym. When I got inside, I couldn't believe what I was seeing: it was 10 at night, and there were all these people – women, black people, Hispanics, white-collars, blue-collars – practising their moves. I came back to England, and I said to Scott, 'I've been to this place for just 10 minutes, and it absolutely knocked me out.'"
Graham shared Hoggett's fascination: he's been a boxing fan since childhood, though he had kept his interest in the sport largely secret ("Boxing was his porn," Hoggett jokes). Together with playwright Lavery, they started to think about how best to use the sweat-soaked world of boxing as the basis for a play. One thing was clear: like all Frantic Assembly's productions – which include Lavery's own Stockholm, from 2007, about a pair of lovers holding each other hostage; and David Eldridge's Market Boy, which in 2006 turned the Olivier theatre into an uncanny replica of Romford market circa 1985 – it would need to be intensely physical, and as true to the real experience of boxing as theatre could get.
"If you watch a show about rugby or football," Graham says, "you don't expect the action to be real. But if you go to see a play about boxing, you'll be really disappointed if it doesn't feel like real boxing. When an actor can't throw a punch, you can really tell."
The first step was to find out whether it was possible to get actors to box convincingly. At a week-long workshop, Graham and Hoggett asked five actors to try punching each other (using stage punches, of course), and decided that they could. Weeks of research – talking to coaches, doctors, and fighters – ensued. Only then did Lavery come up with her script, in which Cameron, a young, disaffected teenager, discovers his talent for boxing at a gym run by charismatic coach Bobby Burgess, alongside four young hopefuls, one of them a girl, Dina Massie ("the battling lassie").
Once the play was cast, the five young actors were given six months to train to a convincingly professional-looking standard before rehearsals began. Their efforts have paid off: every punch and parry in the play, in which the boxers' training sessions, and three matches, are beautifully and fluidly choreographed to Underworld's pulverising beats, looks authentic – and not only to the inexpert eye. Twenty-five boxers went to see Beautiful Burnout in Glasgow, Hoggett says, and most of them loved it; their coach went back four times over. That, for both Graham and Hoggett, is the most important thing: that their show pays tribute to a sport that, whatever the moral questions around it, is an intensely visceral experience, both for boxers and audience.
"Our research showed us how stunningly beautiful boxing is, choreographically," Hoggett says. "So many choreographers have gone to boxing for inspiration: it's as good as it gets. I'm not sure we can get anywhere near it with theatre," he adds humbly, "but we've loved having a go."
Beautiful Burnout is at York Hall, London E2, until 2 October. Box office: 020-7638 8891. Then touring. Details: franticassembly.co.uk
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