Simon Jenner July 12th 2024
An end-of-season knockout. Though Joy Wilkinson wrote The Sweet Science of Bruising in 2007, featuring an aspiring woman doctor, only in 2018 when scriptwritingJody Whittaker’s Dr Who did it premiere at Southwark.A ten-hander debut always challenges! It’s directed by Gaby Browning and Bryony Weaver at New Venture till July 20th.
On this evidence, theatre would like her back.
Wilkinson’s theme – four women realising themselves through boxing – came of age with Nicola Adams. Dramatized through fragmentary documents, it’s based on fact: Polly Stokes, like Wilkinson from Lancashire, was 1869 Lady Boxer Champion. And there’s a coup abiding by recent (1867) Queensberry Rules: don’t punch below the waist.
Times typesetter, part-time street-walker, finally full-time Irish fighter Mattie Blackwell (Kate Thomas) asks villain Gabriel if he’s Queensberry but introduces him to a place with those ringside rules.
Svengali of women boxers Professor Charlie Sharp (Jeremy Crow) leads youth astray. Wilkinson’s full of Wildean subtext and plays with faddish theory. Sharp invokes crude Darwinian principles. Blackwell from her black-fingered Times education ripostes with Cartesian dualism; an aspiring doctor does too.
For spit’n sawdust intimacy, the New Venture Studio is hard to beat. Boxers almost leap the front row – the Noble Science of Defence crew’s fight-directing is thrilling. Simon Glazier’s design marks out the floor as a ring, contrasting with a tea service on elegant tables and chairs. There’s a surgery assemblage too: that darkens. Two roped-off spectator enclosures suggest the ring reversed, against a brickwork effect with posters. The bare ring’s the freest place.
John Everett’s lighting suffuses it, as does Ian Black and Esther Draycott’s sound with Irish composer William Balfe’s ‘I dreamt that I dwelt’ from The Bohemian Girl. It counterpoints Blackwell’s character, with one folk-song and orchestral sampling.
When Laura Scobie’s Polly Stokes rocks up to Crow’s ‘Professor of Boxing’ with brother Paul (Thomas Dee), she’s pugilistic, he the pro. Siblings in name only – she was adopted on the doorstep – they’re close but Polly loves to spar. Crow’s clarion puckishness, exploitative if almost benign Sharp acts as a lodestar to whom four very different women gravitate.
Dee’s Paul makes an excellent fist of a fighter not quite up to his elective sibling, but Scobie’s superbly physical Polly cajoles him; and steps up. Scobie unforgettably stamps Polly’s zig-zag to the ring. Yet Polly briefly loses interest when she’s got her man, developing other appetites to deliver a different knockout. There’s confrontation, wounded masculinity, a return.
Charlotte Atkinson’s cut-glass Violet Hunter is a privileged theatre-goer who grows an upper-cut. A pastiche melodrama’s played out by three cast members in front of her, suffragist Aunt George (regally vinegary Sarah Donnelly) and aspiring sentimental novelist Emily (fluttery Alice Larkin who also plays care-worn maid Nancy elsewhere).
Wilkinson shows up the frivolous even in suffrage. Emily’s for melodramatic fiction-writing, George for polite suffrage, who financially supports intellectual Violet, determined to be the first woman doctor, after Dr Garrett of course. She needs money to study in Paris.
There’s Ben Pritchard’s briskly avuncular Dr James Bell whom she assists at a surgery. He’d marry Violet, teach her to be a doctor in all but name. That’s not enough.
Atkinson burns with the isolation of a rationalist male rationalists irrationally dismiss because of gender, deploying crackpot ‘facts’.
Wilkinson’s strong on flawed males: muddled decent Paul Stokes, progressive Bell, espousing barbarism. Violet too finds her way to the ring having patched up Paul. Told by Sharp she has perfect reflexes she rejects something at odds with her calling. Yet….
Sharp’s “it’s all about me” and Aunt George’s assertion of crude Darwinist desperation, bark against the solidarity Wilkinson contrasts it with. Across each personal betrayal the play’s shuttled. In a competitive environment characters discover how uncompetitive they might be.
Gabriel Lamb (vulpine Neil Drew) first tangles with Thomas’s tricksy, seductively idiomatic Mattie Blackwell who also flaunts her way to the ring with a voice full of Dublin cockles. Taunting Gabriel to women’s boxing and sex, she tells how she pulled a Times advert for clitoridectomy.
Hypocrite Gabriel’s gas-lighting wife Anna (Kasha Goodenough), tightening her whalebone so she can’t breathe. Drew’s every inch the smooth sadist, complaining to Blackwell, controlling at home. Goodenough inches out of her trophy-wife corset with memorable ferocity, equally paralysed with fear: Elaine Larkin’s anxious Nancy her only ally.
Shadowing her Blackwell-haunting husband to the ring, Anna finds she’s right-hooked too. But there’s danger. Not for nothing Drew smashes a plate, requiring stitches delivered by Dr Bell’s assistant Hunter “a far better seamstress” when he’s too far under ether to resist.
Wilkinson KO’s her set-pieces. Fights between all four are interrupted by bouts of other, harrowing violence, one heartily deserved. There’s penalties. And in the final corset-loosing round there’s a heart-stopping moment: Atkinson’s character finds herself in two roles.
The paradox of solidarity when you’re knocking each other out becomes a desperate strategy to save two lives. The disturbing element isn’t women’s pugilism: it’s the male gaze.
Atkinson, Scobie, Thomas, Goodenough, Crow, Drew and Dee are superb leads; Donnelly, Larkin and Bell match them. Direction’s fluid, following Wilkinson’s direction-laden text. Browning and Weaver punch through a two-and-a-half hour drama without any drop of energy. It’s great NVT champion recent writing as good as this. It should go to a prize-fight.
The Sweet Science of Bruising
It should go to a prize-fight.
New Venture Theatre, Brighton
New Venture Theatre Studio
http://www.newventuretheatre.org.uk
An end-of-season knockout. Though Joy Wilkinson wrote The Sweet Science of Bruising in 2007, only in 2018 did it premiere at Southwark.A ten-hander debut always challenges! It’s directed by Gaby Browning and Bryony Weaver at New Venture till July 20th.
On this evidence, theatre would like her back.
It should go to a prize-fight.
Directed by Gaby Browning and Bryony Weaver, Production Manager Ian Black, Stage Manager, Katie Brownings, ASMs Lauren Fassam
Set Design Simon Glazier, Set Build & Painting Simon Glazier, Katie Brownings, George Walters, Sam Deards, Tomasz Baraniecki & Chris Kent,
Costume Karl Petrie, Costume Assistant Jane Marlton-Howard, Hair & Make-Up Richi Blennerhassett
Lighting Design John Everett, Lighting Rigging John Everett, Carol Croft Sabrina Giles & Isaac Freeman, Lighting Operation Alex Epps & Sabrina Giles
Sound Design/Operation Ian Black & Esther Draycott
Props Carrie Hynds, Simon Glazier, Carol Croft & Martin Gordon
Poster Tamsin Mastoris & Strat Mastoris, Programme Tamsin Mastoris, Publicity/Headshot Photography Strat Mastoris, Publicity & Social Media Greg Donaldson, Health and Safety Ian Black.
Stage Combat Training & Choreography (Boxing/Fencing) George Metcalf, Chris Connah & Sam Pugh from Noble Science of Defence
Many thanks to Noble Science of Defence, Martin Gordon (posters), Carol Croft (breakaway plates) Jerry Lyne, Culann Smyth, Katie Brownings, Mike Whitttaker (rehearsal space), Gladrags, Milla Hills (Southwick Players( Myles Lock (BLT) Box Office FOH and Volunteers
Till July 20th