Writer: Nicholas Pierpan
Director: Paul O’Mahony
The problem with this play is hard to pin down in one particular area; though a committed effort from a well-rounded team, the whole thing simply falls flat and fails to come to much of anything. There’s no particular part of the production that disastrously drops the ball, but equally, there’s nowhere that excels in any compelling way, leaving it feeling like some form of exercise rather than a show.
The main action focuses on an unnamed protagonist (James McGregor) in a New England of the 20th century as we follow his misadventures as a medical student, amateur boxer and eventual ring-side cutman. As a one-man show, the strength of McGregor’s performance is vital to the whole thing coming off, and here things falter from the first minute. McGregor shows flashes of an engaging performance, but for the majority of the time, he’s just stiff, more focused on maintaining his Massachusetts accent than drawing in the audience, lacking the charm and edge that his scrappy protagonist calls out for.
Whether this is intentional direction from Paul O’Mahony is hard to say, but what’s clear is that it simply fails to connect. Where good direction can be felt is on the design side, where Will Hayman’s inventive use of practical lighting alongside lighting strips at the stage’s edge to form a ring is a clever engagement with the show’s boxing aesthetic, and combined with Rafaela Pancucci’s minimal yet clear sound design work, gives the best support they can to McGregor’s performance. Despite all these efforts, however, no one can do much to uplift what feels like an entirely pointless script.
The story simply isn’t interesting, and nothing much of note happens beyond an unpleasant journey of unmoored self-destruction seemingly for its own sake. The challenge one is left with after this play is trying to figure out what, if any point, or even clear theme, can be gleamed, and if the performance has left you cold as it does here, then you’ve basically just endured a wasted hour. The script can also, at times, crowbar in sensitive topics at random, such as one moment when the topic of race and civil unrest is introduced, so standalone and disconnected from everything else, it can only frustrate.
Ultimately, that’s what this production does best; it functions from beat to beat just to frustrate the whole way through.
Runs until 15 November 2025
