The Frantic Assembly Theatre director talks about the physicality of Beautiful Burnout, coming to the International Arts Festival.
Scott Graham
For as long as he can remember, Scott Graham has had a guilty secret. “Boxing,” he says. “I’ve always been a massive fan. But I always kept it separate from my professional work relationships. It’s a very hard sport to justify. It’s morally complex. Because although it’s got one of the highest safety records, one of its primary objectives is to knock someone out by causing short-term brain damage.”
Happily, Graham found the chance to relieve himself of his burden when Steven Hoggett, with whom he founded theatre company Frantic Assembly nearly two decades ago, visited Gleason’s Gym in New York.
Hoggett was responsible for the beautiful choreography in the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Black Watch, the exhilarating verbatim drama about British soldiers’ experience in Iraq that featured in the 2008 New Zealand International Arts Festival. He was with the show in the US when a friend persuaded him to check out “the order and chaos” of one of the most famous boxing gyms in the world. “He was blown away by it,” says Graham. “I confessed to him that I’d been passionate about the sport for years. And we realised there was a story there.”
Frantic Assembly have been at the frontier of some of the most exhilarating theatre in the UK, splicing text-based drama with highly physicalised movement and club-culture soundtracks. They specialise in telling modern, psychologically driven stories, from the dangers of secrets within friends (1999’s Sell Out) and the difficulty of expressing grief (2005’s Hymns) to art and ethics (2006’s pool [no water], written with Mark Ravenhill) and obsessive desire (Stockholm, which was remade with an Australian cast with Sydney Theatre Company in 2010).
A Frantic show may be full of pace, energy and explosive choreography, but beneath it are what Graham describes as the “complex tiny moments”, the intimate moments that can’t easily be articulated. He points as an example to the final scene of Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm, in which a son learns his brother has died when his father collapses into tears at the wheel. “No one says a word in that scene,” he says. “But everything you need to know is there. We try to find ways of detonating those moments.”
Anyone who saw Black Watch would agree that the unbearably tender scene in which the soldiers read letters from home, and start acting out their own private, silent conversations with their families, is a perfect illustration of the power of movement to communicate over words. So the propulsive, coded, often misunderstood world of boxing, the subject of Frantic’s International Arts Festival-bound new show, Beautiful Burnout (a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland), is a perfect fit. With the audience seated around the stage as though it were a ring, the play is a visceral, sweat-soaked, adrenaline-fuelled portrait of a group of teenage boys – and one girl – punching and dreaming in Bobby Burgess’s gym with a pounding soundtrack from techno maestros Underworld.
“We realised very soon it’s almost impossible to write a new boxing story. You immediately hit clichés: all boxers start from the bottom; all trainers are surrogate fathers,” grins Graham. “So instead we decided to focus on the energy of the gym itself and the role that plays in the world of the people who go there, and whether that world is as dangerous as it might seem.
“Why is it so attractive? What does it give? Because that world doesn’t exist outside the gym. You see on rough estates how people gravitate to the boxing gym – it’s safe, ordered, structured. They are incredible places. We wanted to put the people who had never seen it into this amazing new world; and those who think they know boxing, to see it with new eyes.”
Beautiful Burnout
Frantic’s mantra is to never make the same show twice. “We went into Beautiful Burnout desperate not to make another Black Watch,” Graham says (although he agrees there is an overlap: both shows are about the relationship between masculinity and violence; both give a platform to people whose voices you rarely hear).
The company remain a maverick presence, hovering just outside the mainstream, and also often opting to put on work in unconventional theatre spaces (Dirty Weekend was staged in a hotel; Beautiful Burnout has been performed in real boxing gyms). Part of the reason for this magpie approach is that neither Graham nor Hoggett had any training, so went into making theatre without knowing what the rules were. “Steven was leading a workshop once and a student asked him about Artaud,” says Graham. “Steven had never heard of Artaud, and in fact thought the student had said ‘a tour’, so he started talking about putting stuff in the back of the van …”
But really the secret to their success is simple. “When we began it was just about excitement,” says Graham. “And it still is. It’s just about the desire to stand before an audience and produce a load of energy on stage.”
BEAUTIFUL BURNOUT, Frantic Assembly/National Theatre of Scotland, TSB Bank Arena, Wellington, March 3-18, as part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival.