Disorganised, disagreeing … and overly apologetic

Rocket! takes you through the twelve steps to becoming a boxing world champion, so you too can make your dream come true. After all, who doesn’t harbour a secret desire to be a pro at punching people’s lights out?

The steps are fairly practical fame-seeking advice, such as ‘the name’, ‘the look’, ‘meeting the current world champ (different personality types to look out for)’, etc. None of the steps have anything to do with actual boxing technique, instead focusing on satirising boxing movie classics like Rocky, Raging Bull, Rocky, Million Dollar Baby, and Rocky, to name a few.

While I realise the style is deliberately ‘amateur’, with constant arguments breaking out between the actors as to how the show isn’t working, and whose fault it is, this is sometimes laboured to the point where it seems they’re stalling for time.

Ben Kettell is the ‘presenter’, Callum Beck is his energetic assistant whose asides often steal the limelight. Andrew Killip is their ‘comedy bitch’ – resentful ring card ‘girl’ and gofer – and he gets to do a funny stereotyped impression of a Korean boxer, with voice-over translation from Kettell. All three exert manic costume changes and a multitude of over the top characters, such as the coach, the promoter, the disapproving father, the concerned girlfriend, and various boxing contenders, some of which the audience gets to vote on.

***spoiler***
At the risk of spoiling a surprise (skip this paragraph if want to remain innocent), I’m not sure it’s a good idea to keep an audience ‘volunteer’ on stage for nearly the entire show, and make him wear a mouthguard the whole time. The unsuspecting Mario was an outstandingly good sport (unless of course he was a plant, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t). Lucky they picked someone whose job it is to work with disabled people… In his position I would have been much less compliant. After 10 minutes of being used as a prop I probably would have started testing out how far I could spit the mouthguard or trying out the boxing gloves on the other characters. Perhaps this is what they were hoping for…
***spoiler ends***

I see what they were going for, but they don’t stay in character, which makes it hard for the audience to relax into it and hard for them to establish the necessary theatrical relationships. Callum Beck is most competent in this respect, and it’s his flamboyance and quick thinking that ease some of the awkward moments, but he’s not that much of a team player. ‘Comedy bitch’ Andrew Killip is only extremely put out and disgruntled half the time, the rest he seems perfectly amiable, if bored. Ben Kettell, the brains behind the show, is overly apologetic.

I think all that’s really lacking in this show is confidence. They have a sound, fun idea. As they admit (repeatedly) during the show, they could have worked on their accents more, watched a few more boxing movies and/or mafia movies to accurately inform the jokes and the Italian accents they keep defaulting to. They use ‘we haven’t done our homework’ as an excuse for some weak characterisations.  

The shtick of disorganised amateurs, disagreeing and insulting each other in front of the audience, is all good, but the one-up-man-ship is too convincing at times; that, and the constant apologising, is off-putting.
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