The Sweet Science of Bruising

Bruising drama that delivers a punch against the patriarchy

Ken Towl

KEN TOWL goes 12 rounds with the latest must-see play to be staged at the Coulsdon Community Centre.

Director Anya Destiney has not made things easy for herself. The Sweet Science of Bruising makes big demands. This is a fast-moving play with no padding. All of the cast have to bring emotional weight and credibility to their roles. They play types – characters living on the margins of Victorian society for a variety of reasons – but they also personify individuals. And that takes a strong cast. Fortunately, Theatre Workshop Coulsdon is more blessed with good actors than many amateur troupes.

Cleverly, the set design is minimalist, allowing for rapid scene-changes in which, rather wittily and in a way the opening night audience got immediately, those members of the cast moving chairs and reversing windows are spoken to like servants, their presence acknowledged just enough to explain their actions without cutting into the tempo of the play. All of this sits comfortably with the rest of this Joy Wilkinson play, which focuses on the role of women in a society of high standards, an apparently rigid society of strict morality with strictly defined class and gender roles. It is also a society of double standards. In different ways, none of the characters are who they purport to be.

 The pivotal role of “Professor” Charlie Sharp (his title very much in inverted commas) is ably carried by Connor Nestor. He has his own secret, of course. In a society like this, everyone will. On the surface, he is the outgoing, roguish impresario who promotes “lady boxers”. It is to Nestor’s credit that he makes Sharp a loveable rogue, appropriate for a man who while on one hand making money from getting women to punch each other, is, on the other, offering them a chance to gain their independence from the men who limit them.

Vanessa Hammick brings flesh and blood (and bruising) to the role of Violet Hunter, the nurse who ought to be a doctor. Hammick plays Hunter with a cool, calm intelligence but you can feel the rage simmering underneath. The boxing ring gives her the space to punch back at a world that has held her down. “How much longer can we watch and wait?” she asks. She doesn’t wait. Her presence dominates every scene she is in. She is no lightweight.

Polly Stokes has spent her working life as a Lancashire pit brow worker, picking stones out of lumps of coal. Now she wants to be a fighter. Indianna Scorziello has fun bringing her to life, all piss and vinegar, a strong working-class woman (with a secret of her own) keen to punch up against anyone who is punching down. Not all of her bruises are earned in the ring.

Matty Blackwell, with her black hands and red dress, is a whirlwind of wit and energy with an accent that is straight outta Dublin. Her hands are black from typesetters’ ink, while her dress hints at her other trade. We first meet her when she encounters the rather pathetic Gabriel Lamb, a cypher for all of the horrors that men inflict on women. He appears to be loitering, shyly soliciting, but not quite able to approach a woman. Matty’s question, is he “an admirer of Fanny?”, throws him. Her euphemism is too obvious for his hypocrisy. One day she will punch her way out of poverty, but for now she will lie back and think of Ireland.

Gabriel’s wife, he claims, is dead. Not quite, though she doesn’t have much of a life.

You have to sympathise with Francesca Auletta, who plays Anna Lamb. Anna is shut up by her husband, shut up in the home, shut up when she tries to speak. The danger she faces in the ring is as nothing to the danger she faces from her husband. Auletta is not given much of a voice as Anna. Indeed, in one scene the character is so vanquished that she becomes mute. In the boxing scenes, she wears a mask, a literal version of the masks that all of the characters wear, and her bruises, contracted in the home rather than the ring, are hidden from view. So much of Anna is hidden from us and Auletta does well to present her as a believable and tragic figure who adds real gravitas to the story.

So, that’s the lady boxers, but an honourable mention should go to Joe Wilson who was so horribly sinister as the respectable philandering wife-beating hypocrite, Gabriel Lamb, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a character straight from Victorian melodrama… or out of the modern manosphere, superficially strong and yet laughably weak at the same time. He was as convincingly vile as he could be.

Addressing the merits or otherwise of boxing as a metaphor for the fight that women have to succeed in a patriarchal society, towards the end of the play, comes the line, “I want women to take control of their own destiny.” Anya Destiney has certainly taken control of The Sweet Science of Bruising.

Like a lot of the output of the Theatre Workshop Coulsdon, their latest production is way better than it ought to be. It makes for a brisk, well-paced two hours on the emotional rollercoaster.

Go along and find out who becomes Lady Boxing Champion of the World!

Ken Towl for Inside Croydon, 23 March 2026