Bitch Boxer

Bitch Boxer is part of the Old Vic New Voices Edinburgh season – a first time venture from the Old Vic with the aim of giving emerging theatre talent the chance to take their work to the Fringe. Bitch Boxer’s author and sole performer Charlotte Josephine certainly qualifies as talented. She is the possessor of the rare ability to create characters for whom audiences end up genuinely caring. Characters like the fiercely independent, yet achingly vulnerable boxer of the play’s title – a young woman who must prepare for a major fight and negotiate her first serious love affair, while still reeling from the recent death of her father.

Josephine’s script, which is in the form of a present tense monologue, has the pacey, rat-a-tat rhythmicality of a boxer’s sparring practice. Frustratingly, however, it does not follow through on all of its half-promised themes (the beginnings of a discourse on women in the male-dominated world of boxing, for instance, is left tantalisingly inchoate) and some of the sentiments teeter on cliché, especially in the sections covering her father’s funeral.

Nevertheless, such is the vivacity of Josephine’s performance that her script never hits the ropes. Besides, there are plenty of excellent lines to balance out weaknesses. When told to keep her “chin up” by her mother, the young boxer is dismissive: “Chin-up?” she says questioningly, “chin down and fists up more like!” To use boxing jargon, Josephine is one upstart whose future career will be worth a ring-side seat.