Going For Gold at Park 90 review: this boxing underdog story packs a real punch
Everyone loves an underdog story and this play about Frankie Lucas, the neglected black British middleweight boxing star of the Seventies, fits the bill several times over. It’s the debut stage work by Lisa Lintott, who knew Lucas in her London youth and decided after multiple other careers to write a vehicle about him for her actor son Jazz, who was stuck, he has said, playing “terrorists and drug dealers”.
What the resulting drama lacks in narrative sophistication and stagecraft it makes up for in heart and verve. It also makes the world of boxing – the confusing weight classes and titles, the seeming randomness of the beefs and the bouts – compelling even to a neophyte. Above all, the overt racism of the fight world at that time rises off the stage like a reek.
Aged nine, Frankie finds himself transplanted from St Vincent in the Caribbean to London and fetches up at a boxing club in Croydon run by copper Ken Rimmington. Frankie has talent and a temper but Ken helps him become ABA Middleweight champion aged 19 in 1972 and again in 1973: by then, he already has a baby son, Michael, with his younger girlfriend Gene.
His path requires total commitment – 5am runs, winter dips in Hampstead ponds – for sparse remuneration. He also has to face not just the abuse of fans but a system that’s been rigged against black boxers since Winston Churchill banned an interracial bout in 1911.
Passed over by British selectors for the 1972 Olympics and 1974 Commonwealth Games, he attends the latter as St Vincent’s lone team member, wins a gold and turns pro with legendary trainer George Francis. A paucity of bouts, and an implied, undermining dependence on marijuana, means he never wins a title, or a rematch with his white nemesis, Alan Minter.
The show is staged by co-directors Philip J Morris and the mono-named Xanthus on a roped square, of course, that does duty as a boxing ring, the rooms where Frankie’s relationship with Gene (Llewella Gideon) unravels, and the care home where he and Michael reconnect in later life. The passing years are flashed on the back wall, sometimes augmented with actual footage of “furious Frankie” in action.
The family scenes are prolix and ungoverned but also sweet. The play was written with the involvement of Gene, Michael, and even Frankie, who the creators tracked down after years in oblivion, only for him to die aged 69 shortly before its first performance in 2023.
After some early, dodgy “child” acting, Jazz Lintott hunkers into the fighter’s role, expressing his diligence, charm and physicality but also his capacity for angry self-sabotage (Tinashe Darkwar takes the part at some performances). Gideon is nicely confiding but underpowered as Gene and there’s good work from Nigel Boyle as a bluntly charismatic George Francis.
This isn’t a great play but it brings an arcane and neglected chapter of recent sporting and social history – and a unique character – back to vivid life.
At Park 90, Park Theatre, to Nov 30; parktheatre.co.uk
