It is a reasonable question. Billy has just announced Muhammad Ali is on his way to South Shields and Sheila, his mother, is aghast: “Why would he want to come here?” Unlikely or not, the world heavyweight champion would indeed spend time in the town in July 1977. “I hope he gets battered,” says the embittered mother.
Sheila is more interested in the silver jubilee and the visit of the Queen the day before. For those in the north-east, it was some weekend. Playwright Ishy Din adds more layers still.
He takes the radical spirit of the former Cassius Clay, half-pugilist, half-preacher, adds it to the establishment hoo-ha of the royal party’s lap of honour and then mixes in the gobby fury of punk and the racist violence of the National Front. In 1977, he sees a confluence of incendiary forces: reactionary and revolutionary, nihilistic and progressive. In a deprived north-east, you could be pulled in either direction.
All this finds voice in Sheila’s South Shields home where her younger son Azeem realises that whether he wants to be a doctor or a dropout, he will still be beaten up for the colour of his skin. Big brother Billy, who has the complexion of his white mother and not of his late Asian father, is torn between being violently outraged by the racism he sees and, with equal violence, joining the opposition.
Din cleverly taps into the audience’s emotive memory of this summer weekend while, in Jack McNamara’s production, actors Christina Berriman Dawson, Jack Robertson and Daniel Zareie show the strain of life when the personal becomes political. Outside pressures turn them into a family of love and loathing.
Champion is at its best when Amy Watts’s set becomes a boxing ring where these conflicts ignite. The play loses energy when it pulls towards the small and domestic, sustained more by its themes than dramatic momentum. Although rich in ideas, it does not quite find a story to equal the extraordinary symbolism of Ali’s arrival. In the closing moments, we are more persuaded by the joy of Ali’s parade through town than a sense of resolution for the embattled family.
• Champion is at Live theatre, Newcastle, until 8 March.
