Salvador Kent
Childhood as a blur, recollected through language. The first image Boxeur had stick in my mind was instead someone, no more than a boy, sitting by a train platform. The boy was played by a man, but we do not need to worry about these things in the theatre. His look, ambiguous, mostly in backlight, his figure a silhouette. How would it feel? The train. Off the platform into a foreign country. Crowds of people. The city, the boy is penniless. He stumbles upon a factory. He must become a boxer.
PequodCompagnia’s Boxeur is, to put it simply, an utter coup-de-theatre. It is the sort of theatre that presents documentary as a dream, places the actor as artist, and their investigation as the most important kind of anthropological study. The role of the actor here is to entirely empathetically draw out histories and then not document them, but imagine from them. Maura Pettorruso’s work with Stefano Pietro Detassis then, is a supreme achivement of this sort of theatre, as we watch Detassis trace the story of Eugene “Smith” Lorenzoni and Victor “Young” Perez, two boxers in pre-war France. They are real historical figures who are made myth by Detassis, showing us snapshots of their lives made winding paths, biographies made poetries.
Detassis’s work is an achievement. He has the rare quality to make his single body expansive and epic. There are no more than four or five objects on stage, all used to their full potentiality. This sort of theatre is awe-inspiring — the sort of theatre that distils everything to its best form. If Detassis was to cast another performer to box alongside him, the play would lose its art, because he is his art, not only as dramatic interpreter, but as a human being who has observed the world and decided to tell it through himself.
Detassis has a remarkable body. Here is a performance of sheer athletic ability that doesn’t use the athleticism as a gimmick, but makes it intergral to the form and story. Every training session, every injustice, every character interpreted is infused with an adrenalin and intensity that is majestic to watch. He opens the performance by commenting on his own boxing experience, and this is clear as day. This is an excellent performance, worth watching the whole play for the performance alone.
But the theatrical forms used are equally as scintillating. So often in modern theatre an audience asked to do too much or too little. Too much when an actor rightly says use your imagination, but wrongly assumes this means he can get away with not providing the audience stiumuli to imagine with. Too little when so much money is injected into a West End spectacle that a play is reduced to a magic box with cool tricks. Boxeur, on the other hand, weaponises your imagination to make you conscious. It gives you moments of absolute poetry throughout, and then when it really matters — sucker punches you with what’s on your mind. When Detassis asks us to close our eyes for a minute and imagine war, despite it being unimaginable to a Western audience, we reckon with the images he has provided, and the images on our mind. We are individuals, but together.
Boxeur is total theatre. A consumate achievement of Maura Pettorruso’s direction and dramaturgy and Stefano Pietro Detassis’s tour-de-force performance. Part of the Italian Season at Prague Fringe, this was the companies first time performing in English. As they settle into the translation, they must perform it on the english-language festival circuit again. It will surely be a highlight at Prague this year. Boxeur is a work of art, art of the actor, art of the concept, art of our life. It was a privilege to watch it.
Recommended Drink: Before the match, water, prepare body and mind. Afterwards, Beer in Prague is literally under £2 normally (and it’s delicious) why would you drink anything else?!
You can catch Boxeur at Prague Fringe on the 28th May from 17:15 at Divadlo Inspirace. Get tickets from the Prague Fringe Online Box Office. Don’t miss it!
Raynar Rogers
Shay Mace
