Beautiful Burnout
Pleasance
****
Emma Thompson presents Fair Trade
Pleasance
***
Off we go again. The Edinburgh Fringe is up and running, noisy, exuberant and varied as ever.
This year’s big-ticket theatre offering is Beautiful Burnout, an accomplished collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland and movement specialists Frantic Assembly for a suitably high-octane piece about Scottish boxing.
With echoes of the recent Roy Williams play Sucker Punch at the Royal Court, the audience is seated around three sides of a raised boxing ring. Here five teenagers, four guys and one hard-as-nails girl train in a Glasgow gym under the weary, watchful eye of Bobby Burgess (a wonderfully laconic Ewan Stewart). Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett’s production lands its biggest punches when it shows us the training drills: pumping, sweat-drenched pieces of choreography that capture the raw, bruising power as well as the balletic grace of this bloody sport. The actors, in peak physical condition, push themselves terrifically hard. Not many dramas require their performers to cool down afterwards.
Writer Bryony Lavery nicely captures the tight-knit, gym-forged camaraderie of the teenagers, who thrive in having their super-abundance of energy — as well as personal problems — channelled through Bobby’s discipline. Such hermetic harmony cannot last, though, and the group begins to fragment as three of its members turn professional. Lavery doesn’t shy from showing us boxing’s brutal side but equally doesn’t fully explain the appeal of thumping the daylights out of another human being for a living.
The Fringe is all about attention-seeking, so what better way to attract punters than to announce in the brochure that Oscar winner Emma Thompson is "presenting" your show? Thompson is the executive producer for Shatterbox’s Fair Trade, an earnest and hard-hitting look at the vile sex-trafficking industry, based on verbatim accounts from two young women who were previously this very 21st-century type of slave in Britain.
Theatrically speaking, this exact ground has been covered before — and more skilfully — by Lucy Kirkwood’s magnificent It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at First but that’s no reason why we shouldn’t be appalled all over again, courtesy of intertwined accounts from Albanian Elena, and Samai from Darfur. Lotte Wakeham’s production ends with a stark image, of Elena (Anna Holbek) and Samai (Sarah Amankwah) sitting in front of shelves of box files detailing the cases of thousands of girls just like them.
Burnout until August 29 (and at York Hall, London, Sept 16-Oct 2), Trade until August 30. Information: 0131 556 6550, pleasance.co.uk
