Review: Beautiful Burnout ****

You can almost smell the sweat of the performers as they hop, skip and push their bodies around the stage in the name of this production.

It is easy to see why Frantic Assembly's production was the big hit of this year's Edinburgh Festival. Wildly accessible and playful, it never loses a sense of menace – this is, after all, a world in which men beat each other about the head and where serious injury is always a possibility.

Beautiful Burnout has emerged from a very modern company making theatre in a very modern way – apparently Lavery was making script revisions until the final week of rehearsal.

Frantic Assembly, one of the UK's leading physical theatre companies, does something stunning with a script that, despite the physical experimentation happening on stage, never loses its sense of the poetic. Throw in a soundscape created by experimental electronic duo Underworld and you have a show that pummells all your senses. Beautiful Burnout takes us into Bobby Burgess's Boxing gym, in a hard, rundown part of Glasgow.

Four young men and a young woman train under Bobby's watchful gaze, hoping to become the champ.

Ajay Chopra, "a wee brown lad", is the future star of the group and when he tires of Bobby's advice, the wheels are put in motion to a climactic showdown.

The training sessions and the boxing are particularly well choreographed set pieces, performed with slickness and panache by a bunch of actors who look like they could easily step inside an actual boxing ring. The one failing of the play is that the dramatic narrative is shared by almost too many compelling characters, so you end up feeling like you want to know more about each of them. There are clearly racist undertones to Ajay's story and neither his nor Dina's sad story, who seems to box literally to save her life, seem to fully develop.

The Crucible Theatre, Sheffield