Sucker Punch

The play follows two black kids through the 1980s from school to near-stardom in the boxing ring, where they are pitted against each other. Leon, the natural talent, rises quickly, but is beaten finally by his friend, with the more professional management,Troy. On the way, Leon is forced to give up the (white) boss’s daughter and is derided as an Uncle Tom for his devotion to the racist boss. At the end, the gym to which Leon has been loyal goes under, in part because Leon could not win his fight, but also because the boss, Charlie, bet everything on the stock market and lost it in the crash.

This is a pretty terrific play. Roy Williams combines grace and power. The power comes in the muscular way his dialogue, situation and characters claim the stage; there are some stunning set-piece monologues, here played in the boxing ring, where the characters describe fights. But throughout there’s a compelling, plausible set of bare-knuckle rows between the characters. He creates clear, strong psychological lines and keeps the situations wittily sharp but also unabashedly emotional. But then he’s graceful too. The play elegantly skips from time to time, situation to situation; characters are brought in and they leave, fights are won and lost; he keeps deft, he keeps changing his footing (sorry, it’s hard to avoid this critical cliche bollocks, but I’ll stop now). There are duologues, monologues, three-handers, action scenes; he is both a crisply traditional writer and a fluidly challenging one. Conventional because there are rounded characters, clear plotlines, twists, turns and intrigue, a clear climax and even a scène à faire when the two boys - actually a bit implausibly - have a moment of reconciliation. But he’s challenging because of the variety of storytelling means. And you think that the climax will be pitting the white boxer, Tommy, who is being championed early, but leaves for a rival promoter, against Leon. Instead, he meets the entirely unfancied Troy.

(Basic dramaturgical stuff: starts with a Brixton riot, which suggests 1981 or 1985 and ends with a stock market crash which is 1988. I got the sense the play only covered 2-3 years, but then at one point they play Shalamar’s ‘I Can Make You Feel Good’ which was a hit in 1982 and Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’ from 1983. Plus, the play was clearly trying to suggest an epic journey through an era. I’m guessing it covers 7 years then.)

Two things struck me about this show. First, liveness. Williams creates dialogue that sits squarely on the stage, claims it. It’s writing in the present tense, absolutely. This is enhanced by the concentration of the play on boxing, which is entirely about the present tense, the unpredictability of it (football’s the same - as in his Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads, but with any team you’ve heard of, the score is already known). Very smartly Sacha Wares has placed the entire play in and around the boxing ring and the play benefits hugely from this. There are very ‘live’ things going on in this production too. An early monologue by Leon is performed in the ring with a skipping rope; there is simply a level of unfakeable physical skill that is impressive and not the same as acting. In other words, it’s live; at one point, the actor actually missed his footing and had to regather his rhythm with the rope. In a way this just enhanced it. Then later, Troy comes and does an even harder, faster skip with the rope; this is how you know he’s going to win, but, more important, it is how you learn that the kid can really box. One other curious bit of liveness; last night, among the celebrity audience (we spotted Nigel Havers, and there were rumours of David Hare) was Lenny Henry. One of the first lines of the play is the racist gym-owner telling Troy, ‘oi! Lenny Henry!’ There was a frisson in our area of the stalls (and Lenny mugged at us to emphasise the point).

The second thing is the ring. I like seeing the Royal Court transformed. I’ve seen it a few times; the thrust pushed out for The Kitchen in 1994, Roy Williams’s Fallout in 2003, and again for Stoning Mary in 2005. Sacha Wares entirely transformed the space for Mike Bartlett's My Child in 2007. The Sarah Kane season in 2001 split the main house into two spaces for Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. I gather Wig Out! turned the downstairs into a club with a central catwalk. The building was originally a theatre, then became a cinema, then was bomb-damaged. When the English Stage Company took over the Court in 1955, they ripped out the proscenium, extended the stage; in 2000, the whole building was redesigned, with a huge underground bar dug out under Sloane Square and the plaster stripped back to reveal brick and iron trelliswork. For a solid, modest, late-nineteenth-century Italianate pastiche theatre, it’s been immensely flexible. It has a magic size that stacks the audiences vertically against a tall proscenium, giving no one a distant view and just about guaranteeing an art-house crowd can fill it most nights.

But there’s a weird naivety that grips some theatremakers when they start reconfiguring the auditorium. There’s a view around - which has some validity - that the basic late-nineteenth-century actor-audience relation fosters passivity in the audience, a certain demand for illusionistic realism, and that we have naturalised a middle-class set of social and cultural behaviours as How To Watch Theatre; today’s audiences, grown up on interactivity and with short attention spans, need a different approach.

First, I’d challenge all of those; I don’t think silence is the same as passivity; the theatre is barely ever illusionistic (illusions suggest we are tricked into believing things - and we never really believe the fictions are there); third, the history of British theatregoing suggests that a huge range of different audience behaviours is permitted within the basic pros-arch end-on theatre form. Music Hall, Pantomime, lots of stand-up, rock gigs, and more. In none of these would you say the audience was quietly passive; lastly, I don’t believe we are any more ‘interactive’ or that our attention spans are any shorter than previously. It’s lazy journalistic thinking (the MTV generation, etc.) but you hear it said whenever anything like a promenade production or a bit of multimedia or when the auditorium gets restructured.

Now, I have no reason to think these things were behind Sacha Wares and Miriam Buether’s decision to turn the Court stage into a boxing ring; I suspect there may have been a desire to turn us into a boxing crowd. There may have been discussion of Brecht, who thought - very early on - that the boxing audience was his perfect engaged, thinking audience. Certainly, the entrance of the two boxers through the audience before the Big Fight suggested a bit of that.

But this never works. The aim is to strip through the falseness, the pretence, the etiquette, the class; but you just end up more self-conscious, more inhibited, feeling more ridiculous if you shout out (even if you do), more bound by the conventions of theatregoing. I liked the staging but it certainly didn’t make me feel more engaged in the story than a straight proscenium production would have done. I didn’t feel the atmosphere of a boxing match was evoked, in any way; despite the liveness of the physical skill, I knew the outcome of the game was set and its progress choreographed. It would have been possible to do something like Ayckbourn in Sisterly Feelings where there are two endings, but what would have happened then? It’s actually more deterministic than the single track; it implies that there are only two possible options, whereas with on track, it doesn’t suggest options aren’t open, it just says ‘this is what you’re watching’ (just as we experience a single track of life). So, if we were to start yelling encouragement to one of the boxers, we’d be play-acting. And, hey, that might be fun and cathartic and so on, but it still seems to me novelty theatre.

All of that to say, this is a smart play, written deceptively: it is very accessible and broad in its appeal, but it’s very precise and elegant too.