Theatre

Six Rounds

Alan Hindle | Monday 20 June, 2011 17:00

Photo © Helen Mildmay-White

As a sport, boxing is pretty abhorrent to me. On the other hand, I usually aggravate everybody around me during any sort of game when I cheer both sides for getting a goal. “But look at how happy they are,” I explain. “Why shouldn’t everybody get points?” However, people punching each other, getting points for causing injury and pain, means I can’t root for anybody but the referee, hoping he’ll step in and suggest they try something else to resolve their differences, like chatting amiable over a pint. As a metaphor, however, boxing is pretty sweet. Two figures in a ring fighting to survive. Good versus evil, wrong versus right, life versus death.
Six Rounds, produced by Liminal Theatre, turns around the old adage of boxing being a metaphor for life, and makes life a metaphor for boxing. There isn’t much boxing in the play. Just getting by, day to day, is the real battle.
Ace is the semi-angelic young black man trying to avoid falling into the cliched traps of inner city life: gangs, crime, domestic violence, a quick trip to the morgue. Solo is his brother, a former boxing hopeful who did fall in and is now literally trapped in a wheelchair. Written by American playwright John ADEkoje the play is set in New York, or perhaps Chicago, and works the poetry of the sweet science relentlessly. Maybe a little too relentlessly. Maybe by the end I was a little punch-drunk from all the poetry, but the solidity of some of the performances helped keep my feet on the ground. Or, at least, my ass in its seat. And the determination that, dammit, this is a emotional powerhouse of a play so you’d better appreciate the spiritual catharsis, means the Yankee sentimentality of the text often threatened to overwhelm the solidity of its performances. Director Prav MJ did explain to me why she kept the American setting, rather than rewriting and setting the play in the UK, but I still can’t see why it wouldn’t have transferred just fine. Some of the faked accents worked, a few were so gratingly unnatural I felt myself curling into a ball with teeth-grinding despair. It’s perhaps no surprise that the most comfortable performer was also the only American.
Much of the language in the play is undeniably beautiful, and the spare set at the LOST Theatre in Wandsworth, as bare as a boxing ring, lets us focus on the actors. On the whole the performances were good. Again, only a couple were awful, and I won’t single those out, because they were so glaring they don’t need me to highlight them. Rather, I will underscore the performance of Tommy Coleman as the wheelchair-bound Solo who absolutely shone with angry and selfish charisma. He brings a knowing realism to a slightly flighty play.
MJ told me afterwards that she was considering approaching Arcola Theatre to remount the show there after it has finished its run at LOST. It’s a good idea. Not that LOST isn’t an interesting little venue, even if the seating is terrible. And just down Lansdowne Road, the Priory Arms has one of the best blue cheese burgers ever created. And the sticky toffee pudding is as big as a koi drowning in caramel sauce and a pitcher of custard. But Six Rounds, despite its flaws, has enough merits it deserves to be seen by a wider audience, one that might be provided by a venue with a larger circle of regulars.
The show has legs and a few good hooks, it just needs to stop dancing so much and throw a few more solid punches.

Six Rounds plays until 2 July at LOST Theatre, 208 Wandsworth Road, 0207 622 9208, Stockwell Station.

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