Heart-in-mouth stuff … James McNicholas in The Boxer at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Terry Downes was world middleweight boxing champion in the early 1960s. His grandson James McNicholas is a writer, actor and comedian whose biggest success was an advert for TUC biscuits. “He left big shoes to fill,” McNicholas tells us – “even for a clown.” But McNicholas, one third of the sketch troupe Beasts, goes some way to filling them with this gem of a show about his grandfather’s life – and his struggle to live up to it.
It starts loosely in Grandpa Terry’s character, as McNicholas adopts a London accent and recounts the early days of his pugilistic career. “I’m taking to this like a duck” – pause – “who’s really good at boxing,” he says, which gives a flavour of the narrative voice. It’s one stuffed with anachronisms and silly jokes, but true to the spirit of a young Londoner hard-scrabbling his way to sporting success.
These passages are spliced with autobiographical standup by McNicholas, contrasting his dead-end arts career with grandad’s glory in the ring. There’s a graph illustrating their respective successes, and an idiot’s guide to the strict conventions of the boxing movie. Then there’s the tale of McNicholas’s recent honeymoon. He goes whale-watching, gets seasick when back on land, and doesn’t recover. And suddenly the show’s ante – like a prize fight entering its final round – is upped.
Puns and punches: the boxing standup donning his grandad's gloves
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In these latter stages, an engaging but orthodox show becomes something quite special. A lovely joke, repeated and inverted, about the word punchdrunk floats a connection between McNicholas’s neurological condition and Downes’s career on the canvas, as our shmuck of a host finds himself fighting, figuratively speaking, for his life.
In a show that’s as structurally sound than Edinburgh Castle, McNicholas draws on the boxing movie tropes he itemised earlier to deliver a conclusion that floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. Downes travels stateside to defend his crown; McNicholas is on the ropes, before a casual but profound word from granny offers last-reel redemption. It’s heart-in-mouth stuff. I was tempted to run on stage and hold aloft McNicholas’s gloved fist. His show is a knockout.
• At the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August.
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