Sucker Punch, Royal Court Theatre

The poster for Sucker Punch, Roy Williams [3]'s ambitious new play about boxing and race during the schism-prone age of Margaret Thatcher, promises a sort of black British Raging Bull: There in one graphic image are the blood and sweat, the bravado and the pain, of a sport that for self-evident reasons makes it to the stage relatively rarely.

The poster for Sucker Punch, Roy Williams [3]'s ambitious new play about boxing and race during the schism-prone age of Margaret Thatcher, promises a sort of black British Raging Bull: There in one graphic image are the blood and sweat, the bravado and the pain, of a sport that for self-evident reasons makes it to the stage relatively rarely. How do you set actors' juices flowing eight times a week (and risk their jawbones dislocating) in a way that the cinema can manage with comparative ease? One answer arrived at by the director Sacha Wares is to ramp up the atmosphere, in conjunction with a designer, Miriam Buether, who evidently never met a space that she hasn't wanted in some way or other to transform.