Beautiful Burnout

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe
THREE STARS

What a strange play this is. Written by Bryony Lavery, in collaboration with Frantic Assembly, it is, quite clearly, about boxing. But what about boxing, precisely? Though visually it's dreamily stylised to give its intoxicating bouts of pugilism the air of dancefloor abandon, the text has an almost documentary tone. These are characters, for sure: Bobby, the hard-nosed boxing coach, AJ, his showboating protégée, Cameron, the new kid in the ring, Dina, a female slugger with a bottomless rage. Yet Lavery keeps them at a distance, refusing to show us their lives or personalities beyond their macho gym-selves. Cameron is schooled in the fundamentals of boxing, in the delicacy of the human hand, in the expense of quality kit, and we learn too. But why? For the longest time, 'Beautiful Burnout' feels almost totally ambivalent about the sport, neither praising nor condoning, merely reporting. Mostly we see a tremendous amount of work: skipping, jogging and sparring frantically throughout, the cast are drenched in sweat in no time at all; it's knackering just to look at them.

Clearly Lavery has added a pointedly feminine dimension with the presence of the ferocious Dina and sardonic commentary from Cameron's mother. Yet, like everyone else in this play, they're kept at arm's length from us, emotionally speaking, and their presence doesn't add up to much. The physicality of the magnificently choreographed training scenes, set to Underworld's pounding techno, are where the real interest lies. Even those are overshadowed by the last part of the play, when AJ and Cameron square up for a professional fight, and Frantic Assembly unleash such a choreographic and audio-visual tour de force that one can only conclude that this climatic scene was kind of the point of the whole production. The fight is like a waking dream, the two combatants dropping in and out of slow motion as figures from their past spin about them balletically, millimetres from their punches. It's astonishingly pretty, and so hallucinogenic in quality that one almost wonders if it's somehow meant to be allegorical of some inner conflict; that is, until the bone-crunching conclusion. Top marks, then, to Frantic Assembly. As for Lavery's script: it's efficient in its way, but ultimately feels rather cosmetic, a flyweight next to a heavyweight spectacle.