Bruised fruit for the Hard players

There are some people who actually enjoy this sort of thing, and they are the subject of Hard Fruit, Jim Cartwright's new play about the arcane world of gay martial arts up North. Cartwright is not a playwright who makes light demands of his actors. The lead in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice requires such extraordinary vocal dexterity that only Jane Horrocks has ever played her. Hard Fruit calls for one actor to paint a portrait on glass of one of the characters; they've cast a professional glass painter for that. But it also requires two actors to spend the last third of the play locked in an epic physical contest. No wonder the Royal Court has had to hire Geoff Thompson, a martial arts expert, to choreograph the fight.

"Jim wanted the actors to look real," says Thompson, who has a soft Midlands accent and, under his sweatshirt, a frame of quietly menacing bulk. "I am known in the martial arts world as a realist. The martial arts I teach is stuff that would work outside the chip shop, outside a nightclub, if you were attacked outside a public toilet. I said: 'The only way it's going to look real is if they know how to do it'." The epic fight he has choreographed is thus a fruit salad of disciplines including freestyle, Graeco-Roman and Russian sambo wrestling, Thai and western boxing, judo, karate and Brazilian valetudo, in which "anything goes". Nicholas Woodeson and Jim Carter, who had to drop out four weeks ago with a back injury, started training in Thompson's gym in Coventry in November. "I realised," says Woodeson, "that there was quite a lot to bite off and chew." He makes light of his own competence on the mats. He describes himself as a "devout coward" who has merely had to simulate moves which would be no defence in a chip-shop fracas. "With any kind of martial arts any time you lay a hand on somebody else automatically you're looking to make their life as uncomfortable as possible. In a stage fight you're looking to make the other person as comfortable as you are, so it's much more akin to dance."

But this is still the most demanding role he or Richard Hope, who joined at short notice when Carter was invalided out of rehearsals, has ever played. "The difference between physical theatre and this," says Hope, whose role is mainly to be thrown around by the much smaller Woodeson, "is that you can't really cheat. Even though we're aware of each other and we're acting, we're still having to do the moves."

"When Nick puts some of the arm bars on," explains Thompson, "Richard doesn't have to act."

Cartwright met Thompson when he read Watch My Back, an account of Thompson's 10 years as a bouncer on the door of the nightclubs of Coventry, several times polled as the most violent city in Europe per head of population. Cartwright asked him to write a film script based on the book, and the script has just won a development award. "I'd have a go at anything, me," says Thompson. "I've never done choreography before and I'm doing choreography for a West End play."

The autobiography is a tale of redemption. Undefeated after 300 street fights, Thompson is now more in touch with his feminine side, and preaches a message of anti-violence, dissuasion, avoidance and "higher echelon communication". "I had a very dark, even black past, where I had a penchant for knocking people out. You counted your knockouts, which is pretty embarrassing. I used violence as a problem solving tool. I had this epiphany where I realised it was not the answer."

Thus some of his 20 books, which he publishes himself and have sold half a million copies, actively discourage readers from using the techniques they can learn about in all the others. He is the oxymoronic author of both Real Punching and The Art of Fighting Without Fighting.

The two actors under Thompson's tutelage are in a limbo somewhere between the two: faking violence that none the less hurts. Both are in constant pain. Inside a bandaged hand, Hope is nursing a bruised bone. "When Geoff showed me how to do a throw properly," says Woodeson, who as the diminutive, repressed homosexual Choke has to lift Hope, twice his size, above his head and crash him down on the mat, "I actually couldn't bend over prop-erly till after Christmas."

"It's good that they're walking around with injuries," says Thompson, "because that gives them a fighter mentality. I've been training for 30 years and I don't remember a day when I wasn't hurting somewhere. Some of the stuff I couldn't do better myself. They wanted it to look like they were actually hurting each other. Which they are. There is no acting involved in that." Suddenly I find myself tapping again, but this time it's the side of my head.