Claire Luckham’s 1980 play Trafford Tanzi portrays the struggles of a girl to be her own person as she grows up from stifling family to equally stifling marriage in Manchester… hence “Trafford”; the play’s title has often been altered as appropriate when staged elsewhere. The latest name change abandons both alliteration and geography; for the story is told through ten rounds of wrestling, and Ellie Jones’ revival (with some new material from Luckham) utilises lucha libre, the style of fighting which flourishes in Mexico. The reasoning behind staging a play about autonomy and independence in the style of a sport notorious (rightly or wrongly) for scripted bouts is, of course, open to question.
    
It has been a good few years since I was a fan of the grunt’n’grapple game, so I could detect little here specific to lucha libre in fighting style. Principally it seemed to be a matter of costuming: Lycra and masks. Consequently, when Tanzi climactically battles her husband Dean Rebel with the loser to retire from the ring, the stakes are very much in keeping with lucha. A little oddly, the bouts alternate with musical numbers ranging on this occasion from “Stand By Your Man” and “Je Ne Regrette Rien” to originals, steered by DJ The Riddler on a gantry off to one side.
    
The referee has almost as many lines as the other five characters put together, and Mark Rice-Oxley, in sequinned jacket and stripey tights, patters well if sometimes a little too camply. The wrestling choreography may seem a little limited in the early stages (a lot of body-slams and rebounding off the ropes), but matters hot up through the two hours, although Tanzi’s trademark move the Venus Fly-Trap is remarkably inelegant. The actors, however, do not always integrate these sequences into their scenes, with a slight tendency towards an “act – pause – fight” approach which can hobble the pacing.
    
It’s a fine opportunity for an audience to cheer, boo and heckle as if at a panto. In fact, it rather requires that they do. Without a crowd that is not just engaged but vocally so, it all seems rather pointless. Rice-Oxley and the others gee us along well, but on press night we seemed to need that geeing to be constant; the affair didn’t seethe spontaneously. A grudging submission rather than a knockout.

Written for the Financial Times.