Stage fight

BOXING is the backdrop for Fight Night, a one-man show that Aonghus Óg McAnally will bring to Ennis on September 16.
The McAnally name is synonymous with Irish acting, with Aonghus Óg’s father and grandfather, Aonghus and Ray, being household names.
“The whole family are in the business, my granny is an actress, my mother is an actress, my aunt and uncle are directors; it’s the family business for me,” he says.
Of Fight Night he says, “It’s very much an Irish story, it’s about a third-generation boxer who was handy enough at underage level but, after hitting 17 or 18, the booze and the girls arrive and he lets training slip. Then a few years later he has his own son and decides to make a comeback. The play is set in the week coming up to his comeback fight.”
The central character is Dan Coyle Jr, who has fallen out with his parents, walked away from boxing and is about to take the first tentative steps towards his own redemption.
Aonghus Óg says that there has been a very good response to the play so far. “It’s a one-man show, we’ve been working on it for almost a year now. We did an original run back in the Dublin Fringe Festival last September and luckily enough, it was well received. We sold out and won a few awards and were invited back to Bewley’s to do it again. It was a six-week run there and now we’re going into a full nationwide tour.”
Getting ready for the play was a serious business. “It’s effectively an hour-long boxing workout with a monologue woven through it. I had to do a full three-month training camp to get in shape with it.
“I trained six days a week, getting through two dozen eggs a week, grilled chicken, grilled fish, the whole shooting match. The show runs for just under an hour and I lose three pounds every time I do it, it’s pretty punishing.”
He got some help from Joe Vaughan, a Clare man based in Dublin and immersed in boxing, who he describes as “an absolute diamond”.
Plays like Alone it Stands and I Keano brought a sports-oving audience into theatres and Fight Night is doing something similar. That said, Aonghus Óg feels that it’s really about the character’s journey.
“People have been talking about it as a boxing play and I’ve described the physicality of it to you, but to my mind it’s not about boxing; it’s about families and it’s about fatherhood. He’d been handy at underage level but has a big blow up with his dad a few minutes before a crucial fight and he’s exiled from the family, leaves the ring and leaves boxing for six years. For six years he doesn’t speak to his mother or father doesn’t box but then his son arrived and he decides it’s time to go back.
“There’s the journey of getting back to fitness and stepping in the ring but a much more interesting journey is the journey to having some kind of a reconciliation with the father. Certainly for me as an actor that’s what’s most interesting, how he goes from the moment at the start where they never talk to each other to the end where they have the showdown to try to thrash things out.”