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by Marco Ramirez, directed by Guillermo Verdecchia

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

October 18-November 11, 2018

Jay: “Ain’t about bein’ no Heavyweight Champion of the White World. It’s about bein’ Champion, period.”

Soulpepper has a winner with The Royale by Marco Ramirez.  Ramirez may be best known as a television writer for such shows as Orange Is the New Black, Da Vinci’s Demons and The Defenders, but he is also a playwright and The Royale makes use of effects possible only in the theatre to make its points.  The play from 2013 about a match to determine the US heavyweight boxing champion may be set between 1905 and 1910, but its analysis of race relations then eerily predicts how America came to be the divided, fear-ridden place it is now.

The action focusses on Jay “The Sport” Jackson (Dion Johnstone), who dreams of becoming the heavyweight champion of the world.  To do that, however, in the racially segregated world of boxing in 1905 is next to impossible unless his manager Max (Diego Matamoros) can arrange “the fight of the century” by getting the reigning white heavyweight boxer Bernard Bixby to come out of retirement to defend his title. 

The story is loosely based on actual events.  Jay Jackson is based on the real fighter Jack Johnson (1878-1946) and the reigning white fighter was James J. Jeffries (1875-1953), whom Ramirez has renamed “Bernard Bixby”.  “The Fight of the Century” between them took place on July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nevada.  What Ramirez omits as inconvenient to his story is that Johnson had already won the World Heavyweight Championship in 1908 when he defeated Canadian Tommy Jones (1881-1955), the first White boxer to accept a fight with a Black opponent. 

The fact that Ramirez has changed the names shows that he is interested in the events of the past more for their symbolic rather than historic value.  For instance, Ramirez states in his notes that no boxing should ever occur during the play.  Instead, the fighters face forward, throw punches and mime the effects of punches thrown by their opponent.  When a punches connects the sound is signalled by a foot stomping.  Fight director Simon Fon deserves enormous praise for making this theatrical form of boxing so effective.  Audience applause and reactions are not prerecorded but made by the ensemble in a very stylized manner.  Ramirez also has the fighters speak their thoughts aloud while they are fighting, whether they are psyching themselves up or trying to put down or praise the other player.

Therefore, anyone who is not a fan of boxing should know that The Royale may be about boxing but does not actually feature any boxing in it.  Instead, its focus is on the mental struggles the boxers experience while they fight.  The play begins with Jay fighting a brand-new amateur boxer Purley Hawkins known as “Fish” (Christef Desir) straight from the naval yards.  As we overhear their thoughts, we learn that Fish at least wants to make a good showing even if he doesn’t win while Jay, who at first just wants to teach the young pup a lesson, gradually comes to see that Fish has real talent. 

When Max finally does arrange a fight between Jay and Bixby, both Jay’s trainer Wynton (Alexander Thomas) and Jay’s elder sister Nina (Sabryn Rock) express their misgivings.  Nina is especially worried about what the repercussions will be in her home town, and indeed all around the US if a Black man is seen to defeat a White man in such a highly publicized fight.  She rightly sees that such a victory could lead some White people to take revenge on Blacks for what they would see as the reversal of the natural order of things where Blacks should be subservient to Whites.

The culminating fight between Jay and Bixby is staged in a completely non-naturalistic manner which some may view as a brilliant solution to the problem of deliberately not staging boxing in the play but which others may find to be overly symbolic.  The key, however, is that Ramirez clearly shows that Jay’s fight for the title is a combat within himself between the pros and cons of a Black man’s challenge to the authority of a White man. 

It is this fact that makes the play feel even edgier and more relevant now than when it was written in 2013.  If the historical reasons behind the recent police shootings of unarmed Black men in the US have seemed incomprehensible, Ramirez’s play supplies a good background for why this should happen.  If the sharp turn to the right after two terms of the first Black president in US history seems lamentable, Ramirez’s play explains what happens when a once-dominant group feels that power is taken from it.

Should Jay try to win for himself and his colour or should he let himself lose to preserve order and safety at home and in the country?  This vital question keeps us on the edge of our seats in the second half of the play.

There is no weak link in the cast.  Dion Johnstone is superb at presenting Jay as a complex character.  Johnstone presents Jay’s delight in his offhand, devil-may-care attitude to boxing and life, but Johnstone also shows us that this is simply the image that Jay wants to project.  At the same time as Jay disses Fish for his lack of experience, he privately admires the young man for his inherent talent and later

asks Fish to be his paid sparring partner.  On a deeper level, while Jay has deliberately cloaked his origins in mystery, a visit from his sister wipes all that mystery away and we realize that Jay is motivated to fight the White heavyweight not just to determine who is the best, as he admits in public, but, as he tells Nina, to knock out as if with his fists the prejudice he has seen hurt those around him.  Johnstone masterfully makes the interplay of these variously levels of Jay’s personality absolutely clear.

Christef Desir is well cast as Fish, the only other boxer we see in the show.  Desir’s Fish is a fine contrast to Johnstone’s Jay.  Desir highlights Fish’s will battling Jay’s apparent disdain, his self-doubt battling Jay’s bravado, his anger battling Jay’s coolness.  Desir also makes it completely believable that having been beaten and belittled by Jay, Fish would be overjoyed that Jay would choose him as a sparring partner. 

As Jay’s trainer Wynton, Alexander Thomas is literally on the sidelines for most of the action.  Yet, Ramirez gives him the most important monologue in the play that explains what “The Royale” means.  Going into the show we might have thought the title referred to a theatre or a boxing rink.  In fact, it has only negative connotations for Wynton as a type of ceremonial White ridicule of Black men.  Thomas tells the tale beautifully, having Wynton’s suppressed anger lend the narrative incredible strength.

Sabryn Rock gives a compelling performance, though it’s too bad Ramirez leaves her entrance until so late in the action.  As Jay’s sister Nina, she finally brings Jay’s myth of himself down to earth and confronts him with the negative consequences she knows will occur if he should win his fight against Bixby.  At the same time, Rock shows how Nina struggles to let Jay know that she is not telling him not to fight.  Jay, of course, can only see this as being told he should deliberately lose.  It is largely due to the passion Rock gives the role that we don’t notice the contradictions in what Ramirez gives Nina to say until the show is over.

Diego Matamoros is perfect for the sleazy showman that is the fight promoter Max.  Matamoros has played this type of cynical yet enthusiastic character before and it seems to come as second nature to him.  One of Matamoros’ best moments is during a news conference Max moderates for Jay when Max has to relay a whole range of racist questions from unseen reporters for Jay to answer.  Just through the slightest shifts in intonation Matamoros indicates which questions Max finds acceptable and which ones offensive even though he is obliged to pass both types on to Jay.

The one thing that The Royale makes clearer than any other play about race in America is the dilemma minorities face – how winning in one sphere can mean losing in another.  Ramirez demonstrates that racial divides are so deep in the US that a Black man winning a heavyweight title, or, let’s say becoming president, can engender untold hatred from a majority who see their dominance threatened.  The Royale is a powerful, exciting play, incisively directed and impressively acted that exposes through an historical example the fear that lies behind the shameful news we read every day.                          

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Christef Desir and Dion Johnstone; . Christef Desir, Diego Matamoris and Dion Johnstone; Sabryn Rock and Dion Johnstone. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit https://www.soulpepper.ca