Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Denise Kennedy, Andrew Frizell.
Whitechapel has produced more than a few characters of ill repute and more than a few of notable glory over the last couple of centuries but arguably none were like Bella Burge. A woman who typified the spirit of the East-End, who on her 11th birthday walked through the same misbegotten streets as Jack the Ripper, who was taken in and apprenticed by one of Music Halls leading lights, trod the boards herself, married a championship winning boxer only to see him arrested as part of a bank fraud/betting scam three weeks later in Liverpool and who in the end became the first woman Boxing promoter in the world. Bella Burge is ripe to spoken of just as highly as anybody from the East-End.
However, without Denise Kennedy and her musical director and fellow performer Andrew Frizell, the story of Bella – Queen of the Blackfriars Ring might have become forgotten, faded into history and like us all become dust that blows through somebody else’s tale.
Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Frizell took the audience on a trip of a lifetime, Bella Burge’s lifetime, with great effect and great effort. The smell of leather, of pounding sweat, of the destruction and fear to come late in the woman’s life all paraded across the stage like ghosts caught in memory and the image of the entertainment afforded the general populace of the time caught in the dichotomy of greasepaint like dance on a stage and the perspiration of two men in a ring wasn’t lost on audience who greeted this new and bold play with refreshing zeal.
The moment in Bella’s life that goes from unadulterated, almost breathless and quivering with excitement as she watches two boxers stand head to head and toe to toe and leather fist to leather fist and the sound that signified the terror that was bombarded upon the East-End was pure drama at its very best. To watch Denise Kennedy portray this woman at one moment as a pioneer of British boxing, taking in the sight of two men in a kind of ritualistic dance in which the aim is not to be hit and then, like millions of Londoners around her, reduced to rubble having watched the Luftwaffe destroy her home and her business was brutal and brilliantly acted.
Bella – Queen of the Blackfriars Ring is a play that will serve testament to the Graeme Philips, the Artistic Director of The Unity Theatre who has sadly announced his retirement, fresh, exciting and innovative, a true reminder of the legacy that Mr. Philips has bought to Liverpool in his 33 years at the helm of the Unity. Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Frizell could have paid no higher honour than with this production.
Ian D. Hall