Let’s start with the positive: Wilton’s, that grand old music hall, is the ideal setting for Joy Wilkinson’s (melo)drama about female boxers in the Victorian era. We can imagine them taking to this very stage before a baying audience, even if the suspension of disbelief does waver beyond this.
There’s pep and tang in the current vogue for re-spinning period dramas with a self-consciously modern, feminist slant. Yet where The Favourite and Gentleman Jack lead not everyone can follow so effortlessly and what we’re left with here, in 1869 London, are some implausibly woke attitudes towards sexual equality and sexual preference. At a certain point, I realised I had ceased to believe a single word that anyone was saying.
The first half sees a somewhat effortful assembling of the four protagonists who will compete to be the “Lady Boxing Champion of the World”. There’s Violet (Celeste Dodwell), a nurse who wants to be a doctor; prostitute Matilda (Jessica Regan); rich, married Anna (Emma McDonald) with a violent husband and Polly (Fiona Skinner), a foundling whose adopted brother-cum-lover is a boxer. If that isn’t a cross-section of every social problem, I don’t know what is.
Dodwell, blessed with the most fully developed character, is also the standout performer, making Violet wonderfully poised and fierce. Kirsty Patrick Ward’s production courses with energy, especially in the energetically choreographed fight scenes. No knock-out, but a narrow win on points.
Until Jun 29 (020 7702 2789, wiltons.org.uk)
