Interview: From boxing ring to Dickens' festive classic

Bryony Lavery likes to do things differently.

While some playwrights spend time carving out a niche in a particular genre, Lavery's last two productions were worlds apart.

Last year her musical version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, which premiered in Birmingham, won rave reviews from critics. A few months later she was back, this time with a gritty play about boxing. Beautiful Burnout was one of the big successes of the Edinburgh Fringe, a firm hit with everyone from those on the sofa at BBC2's Newsnight Review to ordinary theatregoers. It wasn't just the subject matter of the two productions which was polarised; stylistically they were opposite ends of the spectrum.

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A Christmas Carol was a family musical which came complete with happy ending.

Beautiful Burnout was an edgy play set entirely in a gym's boxing ring where men – and a woman – pummel seven shades out of each other, was developed by Lavery alongside one of Europe's leading physical theatre companies. However, Lavery is not one for conforming to type.

Now comfortably into her 50s with short, slightly dishevelled straw-blonde hair, the Wakefield-born writer came out as gay following the death of her husband. Today, sitting in the West Yorkshire Playhouse, she seems like the kind of content middle-aged woman for whom boxing would hold little appeal.

"Was I a fan of boxing?" Lavery regularly has to repeat questions, having been "mysteriously deaf in one ear" for the past 12 months. "No. No, not at all. I understand it a bit more now, but I certainly wouldn't say I was a fan. Really, it all started when Frantic Assembly invited me for a mystery lunch."

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Frantic Assembly, now 15-years-old, is at the forefront of physical theatre in Britain. Movement, design and dance are as much part of the company's productions as text, but Frantic specifically wanted Lavery, who had worked with the company once before on a play called Stockholm in 2007, to come up with a script for its latest show.

"They had the idea of a boxing play when Scott (Graham, who founded Frantic Assembly with Steven Hoggett and Vicki Middleton) went to some famous gym and saw the boxers training," says Lavery. "They told me the idea and I thought it might be interesting to give it a go."

Beautiful Burnout is a play which makes serious demands of its actors.

"That was the key. I didn't even start writing it before the play had been cast. We needed to see that it was possible for actors to train and learn how to move . They had to look like boxers in the ring," says Lavery.

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An intense casting process revealed there were indeed actors who could cut it in the ring, but even then they had to spend six months getting into shape.

"On stage when they are sweating and looking like they are fighting and working really hard, well, I don't think there's much acting needed there," says Lavery. "Frantic Assembly have really created something that looks fabulous.

"We were quite concerned because we knew we were really pushing the envelope, with Underworld (the British duo best known for their

1990s hit Born Slippy) composing the music and using the boxing ring as the only location, but people seemed to enjoy it."

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Lavery, whose playwrighting career now spans four decades, has been around long enough to take a sanguine attitude towards the stunning reviews the play received.

"You are being judged by someone you don't really care to be judged by," says Lavery. "The truth is, you have to believe in what you are doing, but not believe in it too much. It is a strange balance to try to achieve."

Lavery had to draw on that certainty when she was asked by Chichester Theatre to adapt Dickens' A Christmas Carol for the stage, complete with a large community cast.

"It's actually not intimidating but very comforting to be working with such a major writer who has done all the work and created all the characters for you," she says.

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"The key moment for me came when I realised that it was a ghost story – that's how you manage to get such a large cast on the stage – you set the whole thing in a place where there are ghosts all around."

As big a hit, albeit in a very different way, as Beautiful Burnout was this summer, Lavery is delighted that the West Yorkshire Playhouse is staging a new production of her Dickens adaptation. With both shows opening in Yorkshire this month, it's a rare chance to see the range of a playwright in the space of a few weeks. However, those who grab the opportunity will no doubt be left with the feeling they have absolutely no idea what Lavery will do next.

Beautiful Burnout, Sheffield Crucible, to November 13. A Christmas Carol, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds November 20 to January 2011.

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