Review: Bitch Boxer (Arcola Theatre)

Review by Matthew Plampton

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Can a play about boxing and grief truly make you feel every emotional punch? That is the intent of Charlie Josephine's Bitch Boxer, starring Jodie Campbell in a revival of this work originally staged back in 2013 at Edinburgh Fringe. This is a piece that requires extraordinary physical and emotional commitment, as it grapples with loss, relationships, and ambition. But did this production deliver a knock-out punch or was it a swing and a miss?

Bitch Boxer is set in 2012, the first year women were permitted to compete in Olympic boxing, and follows Chloe Jackson, a young boxer from Leytonstone, navigating the brutal, male-dominated world of the sport whilst carrying the weight of her father's death. Campbell is magnetic from the moment she enters the space with an intricate skipping routine. What strikes you immediately is how deeply she has absorbed the physicality of boxing; every combination thrown, every defensive slip, every ragged exhale carries the weight of genuine training, shaped in no small part by Mateus Daniel's meticulous movement direction. There is no theatrical shorthand here, no approximation of the sport. Campbell has done the work, and the audience can feel it in every sinew. 

Yet it is not merely her physicality that commands the stage; her performance brims with a swaggering confidence that makes Chloe utterly compelling to watch. She delivers the script's sharp humour with impeccable timing, drawing genuine laughs that punctuate the tension, before pivoting seamlessly into moments of devastating emotional rawness. It is a performance that refuses to let you look away.

Campbell is at her most riveting in the play's climactic sequence, narrating her way through the final qualifying fight that will determine whether she reaches the Olympics. The passage is remarkable; simultaneously breathless and controlled, urgent and achingly precise. You catch yourself holding your breath alongside her, pulled entirely into the fiction. Moments like these are why theatre matters: stripped back, undeniable and burning with life.

Where the production falters, however, is in the script's handling of grief. Charlie Josephine gestures towards the profound impact of loss on Chloe but never truly grapples with it. There is a great deal of bottling up, pushing forward, and channelling pain into punches, but the play seems content to leave that emotional suppression largely unexamined. The conclusion, in which Chloe wins her match and accepts her girlfriend's love, is offered up as catharsis, but it does not quite earn that weight. A sporting victory, however hard fought, cannot serve as a proxy for confronting what has been buried, and the acceptance of a tender gift from her girlfriend, meaningful as it is, does not undo the damage of sustained emotional avoidance. Josephine's script needed to sit longer in the discomfort, to let Chloe reckon with the fact that her wounds remain open rather than papering over them with the glow of triumph.

The pacing, too, is not without its issues. Prime Isaac’s direction of transitions between scenes allows the production to occasionally stall, with transitions that lack the snap and purpose of the scenes they connect. Given that Campbell generates such extraordinary propulsive energy in performance, these interludes feel all the more conspicuous, briefly puncturing the tension that the rest of the production works so effectively to sustain.

Hazel Low's set design, Mwen’s sound, and Jessie Addinall's lighting deserve considerable praise. Together they transform the Arcola's Studio 2 into something that feels both suffocatingly close and expansively charged, mirroring the dual scale of Chloe's world; the tight confines of the ring and the enormity of her ambition beyond it. The sound and lighting are particularly effective in differentiating between the narrative's time jumps, providing clear yet unobtrusive signposts that guide the audience through Chloe's fractured chronology. Addinall's lighting is especially noteworthy in this regard, carving the space with shifts in colour and intensity that heighten each emotional gear change without ever overplaying her hand.

Bitch Boxer is, ultimately, a production carried by an extraordinary performance. Campbell's performance alone justifies the ticket price and the journey to Dalston; a feat of endurance, charisma and emotional transparency that marks her as a genuinely exciting stage talent. One simply wishes the script had the same courage as its protagonist; the willingness to stand in the ring with the harder, messier truths of grief, rather than bobbing and weaving around them.

Bitch Boxer plays at Arcola Theatre until 14th March. Tickets from https://allthatdazzles.londontheatredirect.com/play/bitch-boxer-tickets

Photos by Ross Kernahan