Blood and sweat

Steven Hoggett got his first taste of boxing in late 2008. The co-founder of the ground-breaking physical theatre company Frantic Assembly was in New York touring with Black Watch, Gregory Burke's landmark play about soldiers in Iraq. The cast was rehearsing opposite Gleason's Gym, Brooklyn's world-famous finishing school for champions, and one night Hoggett dropped in to have a look at the place where Jake LaMotta, Mike Tyson and the young Cassius Clay had trained.

He was there just ten minutes, but the visit left a powerful impression on a man who had never been that interested in the sweet science. “I was absolutely terrified for the first three minutes, then quite intrigued about what was going on in there, and then by the end I was thinking it was the most incredible place I'd been.”

He talks about his new fascination exhibiting an award-winning choreographer's appreciation of fitness and muscle control, grace and timing. “Boxers can be seen as violent and brutish. But every single one of those guys has been through the most intense athletic training. And what they have to do up there—the split-second timing, minute after minute after minute—is incredible.”

He got talking to Scott Graham, Frantic Assembly's other artistic director and a lifelong boxing fan, and Beautiful Burnout was born. “That's how most Frantic shows get started,” Hoggett says, “an innocuous conversation that gets you thinking. We'd never seen a show that truthfully put boxing on stage. If it's been done, it wasn't as authentic as we'd like.”

The idea of “truthfully” putting boxing on stage seems absurd at first. How can you choreograph the improvised, explosive, seemingly instinctive violence of a three-minute bout in a title fight without risking the actors' safety? The audience couldn't feel they were watching something staged – they had to feel the thrill of a fight, the sense of danger.

Nevertheless, two years after Hoggett visited Gleason's, Beautiful Burnout is halfway to selling out on its debut run. Praise has been heaped on the realistic fight scenes, which Hoggett himself believes are “as close to boxing as we think is possible." 

The fighting is choreographed, but to a know-nothing like me, at least, it looks like real fighting. “They are making contact,” Hoggett asserts. “There's no pretence at boxing in the show; they really get stuck into each other.”

You can't fake boxing and make it this realistic. There's no way actors without energy and stamina to spare could cope with the show's huge physical demands. And as well as sheer fitness there was technique to learn. “In boxing, every move you do is ballistic. You need so much control.”

In short, the cast had to learn to box. “In January we cast the five performers who were playing the boxers, and we gave them the means to go to the boxing gyms and train for six months before rehearsals started.”

At the end of that six-month period I meet Taqi Nazeer, who plays the strutting prodigy AJ Chopra, in the Griphouse gym on Glasgow's Possil Road. It's not the cheeriest neighbourhood, and the gym is unprepossessing: dingy stairwell, crumbling plaster, dark corridors. But though this is a world away from a place like Gleason's, you get a sense of what impressed Hoggett. The atmosphere's not violent but disciplined. Movements are being drilled, over and over again, until they are part of a person. Upstairs, in a cavernous empty room smelling of stale sweat and echoing with Polish rap, a young man is working away at a punchbag. He looks like he could go on for hours more, and doesn't look up when we come in.

Nazeer has been working here with the resident trainer, Peter Mackenzie. “He's been training like a real boxer,” MacKenzie tells me, “doing the same as all the fighters.” Nazeer threw himself into the preparation even before he had signed the contract for the show – which was his first professional role. “The minute I knew I could audition for a show about boxing I walked up to Peter and said, just train me to be a boxer.” He would do two or three long sessions in the gym every week throughout the eight month period before rehearsals started.

McKenzie found Nazeer a driven student. “He was in alright shape, but the coordination wasn't there. He found it tough but he was really motivated.” As well as classes with the rest of the gym Nazeer had frequent one-to-one sessions where McKenzie would focus on his movement. “I was training him to be fluid so he'd look like a boxer. We took out some of the elements to do with being a fighter—heavy sparring, things like that—and replaced them with movement-based stuff.

“After all that,” Mackenzie concedes, “he's looking pretty slick.”

Nazeer appreciated the focus and intensity training required. “I loved the training, the blood and sweat." 

Blood and sweat you might expect of a boxing gym, but there were surprises in store for the actor. “You'll see these nutters with tattoos. They look like murderers, but you throw a jab wrong and they'll put an arm around you and say, 'This is how you do it.' They take you under their wing – there's a loving atmosphere, a caring atmosphere.”

Most of Beautiful Burnout takes place in a place a bit like the Griphouse. The play lovingly brings to life the passion for self-improvement so evident in the gym, turning circuit training into a dance routine in one of several pulsing sequences which hint at Hoggett's work as a choreographer for music videos. 

But the fictional gym is also characterised by love of the doomed, destructive kind. At the heart of the play is the figure of the grizzled trainer, Ewan Stewart's Bobby Burgess, the aspiring fighters' mentor. His word is law, and eventually he sends one of his ambitious, naïve pupils into a fight he's not ready for.

When I ask Peter McKenzie about the show, he doesn't know how the story will end. “There's only three endings in boxing,” he tells me. “Rocky, where he wins. Rocky II where he loses. And Million Dollar Baby.” The third, Clint Eastwood's drama about an ambitious young boxer left paralysed by a fight, is the one he doesn't like. 

“The film's based on a freak accident. But you can fall off a bike, a skateboard, anything. It just so happens to be in a boxing ring.” Boxing is Mackenzie's job, and he doesn't like that stories about boxing focus on the rare circumstances where it goes wrong. His gym is a place where a group of obsessive men pursue their pastime. It's not home to the mythic figures who appear in stories about boxing—the glorious champion, the tragic loser crushed by his dream.

A few weeks later I ask Taqi Nazeer whether he thinks the show is an accurate portrayal of boxing. We're backstage in a corner of the Pleasance, a few days into the run, and so far every performance has been a sellout. There's half an hour before the show's strenuous forty-minute warm-up begins.

"You see two massive extremes here", he says of the show. "You see what can happen if you make it big; you see the fame, the fortune. But you see the other side too." No matter how unrepresentative the horror stories are, there's no denying that some boxing careers end horribly, or that people turn out to watch boxing matches in the knowledge that a disastrous outcome is always on the cards.

Boxing matches, and plays about boxing. “The show's like boxing," he says. "The audience don't want to see how much we work, they just want to see an end-product. Same in boxing – you want to see the end-product. Who wins, who loses. Anything after that, they're not interested”

Beautiful Burnout has kept the audience interested so far. There are rumours circulating backstage—later confirmed—of a Fringe First award; there's talk of extending the show's touring dates into the new year. Nobody wants to seem too excited, but there's a sense of expectation, too, a feeling that this could turn into something bigger. Maybe this is what waiting for a title fight is like. "Of course you'd like recognition for the work you've put in," says Nazeer. "Like a boxer. You want to be recognised for how good you are."