Flyweight
Fabulous opening night for Maggie Sawkins’ new poetry show, Flyweight, at the Square Tower last night.
Interweaving personal tales of family life with snapshots of Heart of Portsmouth Boxing Club (great impromptu speech by Q. Shillingford), Maggie creates a playful atmosphere, with her boxing names poem, her I v O vowel knockout head-to-head, and her Keats-Byron reply to Muhammad Ali.
So, when we return to the unsent letters to her brother and anecdotes of childhood confessions, the telling details hit all the harder.
Magnificent ‘visual interventions’ by Matt Parsons (special shout-out for the boxing nuns) give the piece punch, shape and cohesion: ‘Seconds out, ROUND TWO.’
And congratulations to Mark C Hewitt for directing another engaging performance. Far from the raw ache of Zones of Avoidance or the hard-hitting world of Diving into the Wreck, the new show is enlightening, engaging, amusing — and it invites us to imagine ourselves as different people, able to duck and weave, to spar and knockout with the greatest.
Next on at Chichester Festival, 12 June: well worth going along.
