Everyone loves an underdog story and this play about Frankie Lucas, the neglected black British middleweight boxing star of the Seventies, fits the bill several times over. It’s the debut stage work by Lisa Lintott, who knew Lucas in her London youth and decided after multiple other careers to write a vehicle about him for her actor son Jazz, who was stuck, he has said, playing “terrorists and drug dealers”.
What the resulting drama lacks in narrative sophistication and stagecraft it makes up for in heart and verve. It also makes the world of boxing – the confusing weight classes and titles, the seeming randomness of the beefs and the bouts – compelling even to a neophyte. Above all, the overt racism of the fight world at that time rises off the stage like a reek.
