A certain kind of actor likes to suffer for their art. It’s Lyndall Grant’s job to make sure they don’t. “Some actors will insist on being slapped,” she says. “It’s the most bizarre thing. What other job has that? You don’t turn up to an office and go fine, slap me, it’s fine, I need to really feel it today. It’s ridiculous.”

Grant is a fight director, an expert in stage and screen combat who creates credible – yet safe – scenes of physical conflict. In music theatre there’s a saying that you sing when words are no longer enough to express your feelings. Grant teaches something similar, if you replace soaring voices with flying fists.

From a frenzied flurry of blows to a satisfying kick to the crotch, there are a wealth of techniques to simulate combat without fear of real injury. In fact, to the dismay of masochistic actors, Grant steers away from slaps when choreographing scenes, “because in order to make them look realistic you generally have to hurt someone. After a time the victim’s going to pre-emptively flinch and the other person is going to pull back. Or they don’t sell it, in which case it looks a bit rubbish.”

The sleights-of-hand (and feet) that allow a fight to appear real are just a tiny part of a fight director’s role. “I’ve absolutely been in jobs where they go ‘can you just show us your tricks and we’ll slot them in later on?’ The things that’s hard is that it’s not just about a trick. It’s not just about a slap. That’s the same as saying ‘can you give me a sentence and I’ll put it somewhere in the show?’”

Grant always focuses on the ways in which conflict serves character and story.

Each fight director has their own flavour. Some specialise in the details of military history or particular martial traditions. Grant always focuses on the ways in which conflict serves character and story. A well-realised fight tells us volumes about the people involved: their relationship to violence, their feelings towards other characters, how they respond in a crisis. The choice of a single movement can be as revelatory as any line of dialogue.

“A slap with an open hand is different to a strike with a closed fist which is different to a back fist which is different to a stomach punch. A cuff to the side of the head versus a smack to the centre of the face, they’re all a different language.”

Though she might trade in simulated violence, Grant says that a scene needs to earn it. “You have to earn how the first move comes. Maybe that comes five steps back. Why is the fight there in the first place? What does the production want to achieve there? A good way to answer that is to go: what happens if you take the fight out? Does it change anything? Maybe it’s talking about a character’s journey, maybe it’s a pivotal emotional point.”

She says it’s surprisingly rare for a fictional fight to take place simply because one character wants to hurt another. “Most fights are where they actually want to get something out of the other person which they’re not achieving, and so it spills over into violence. At any point one of the characters could stop and go ‘ok, I’ll give you what you want, or we’ll walk away’, but if they don’t, it’s because their objectives are so strong that they both keep on going.”

Though it shouldn’t be apparent from your seat, stage combat is a world away from the real thing. Some actors have real martial arts training, but a black belt in karate can be an impediment if you’re starring in a kitchen sink drama.

“People who have been trained to a high level have a muscle memory that tries to close the distance and facilitate landing a hit, whereas we want to do everything but that.”

The situation is reversed when performing for a camera: “If you pull a punch it sees that.” But in both cases performance combat breaks down the messy fluidity of a real fight into a series of legible movements, a “sequential storytelling moment” whose rhythms follow the logic of narrative. “The audience don’t necessarily need to understand the fight, they need to understand the character journey. The fight is a vehicle for the actors to be able to tell a story.”

There are only a handful of fight directors in Australia, and even many people in the local theatre and film industry are only vaguely aware of their existence. It’s a different story in London, where Grant trained first as an actor and later as a stage fighting specialist. In the UK it’s much more likely that any actor who has been to drama school will have done at least a basic level of fight training at one of the three major fight societies, who collectively employ hundreds of teachers.

She discovered she adored teaching the art of fighting just as much as she did performing it.

Grant still remembers the first time she picked up a sword in class. Shegrew up on a diet of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, and instantly reconnected with the romance of swashbuckling drama.

“But what I discovered as a performer is that it asks everything from you. You have to have physical skill, you have to have physical awareness, but you’re also working in choreography and expressing through the body.”

While training at the British Academy of Dramatic Combat, Grant was asked to assist with teaching. She discovered she adored teaching the art of fighting just as much as she did performing it. “After a certain point of time I wasn’t even applying for acting work because I was so busy with the fight directing. That became my thing. Apparently, I’m a fight director.”

Since returning to Melbourne in 2016 she’s worked regularly with companies including Melbourne Theatre Company, Malthouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company. She ran stage combat classes at VCA until a role as performer and movement captain in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ate up her teaching time. She’s continued to teach stage combat courses through her company Captivate Live, though, which also has a UK arm.

Actors training in stage combat can also develop a greater awareness of their body as a tool she says. “Simple things like where your hips are facing will explain where your focus is. What you’re looking at will be what the audience is looking at. If you’re looking at the other actor and then take a moment to look down at your sword, that’s like a film cutaway to the sword and back up again, telling the audience ‘I want you to look here now’.”

Observing one of her regular classes in Carlton recently , it’s clear how much fun the dozen performers are having dodging, feinting, sparring both verbally and physically. But when Grant introduces the element of suffering – of actually acting injured – the jovial atmosphere abruptly takes on a dangerous edge. Slapstick is just a scream away from drama.

Even when simulated, violence can be deeply confronting, and Grant takes seriously her duty of care as a teacher. “I’ve absolutely come across people who have themselves experienced violence, either as a perpetrator or a victim, and that’s one of the things I’m finding in the last couple of years post #MeToo, and also with the really good developments in intimacy co-ordination. Now people are more willing to have conversations about things they’re feeling scared about.”

Grant sees her job as one that empowers actors. “If they spend the whole show thinking about this one moment that terrifies them then it can literally unravel the whole production... the whole point of having stage combat technique is that it gives you permission to look aggressive and look violent and look like you’re hurt without any of these things happening.”

It can be just as challenging to play the perpetrator of violence as its victim, Grant says. Particularly in scenes involving sexual violence, actors – typically male – will instinctively be appalled by what they’re called on to simulate. “That’s quite often a moment we flag with the director and say ‘just make sure he’s ok’ and they’re all ‘he’s fine!’ and you look at the poor guy’s face and go: he’s not fine. He’s getting into a place where you go ‘this is so wrong’.”

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The cultural gendering of violence often rears its head in Grant’s line of work. There are actors who feel they’re expected to be proficient fighters on account of their gender, and those who find Grant’s confronting.

“Very frequently someone will go ‘oh, it’s a woman telling me how to fight?’ It’s really boring. It happens quite a lot. Again, I think it’s changing post-#MeToo, where a cis male can say ‘I don’t know how to fight and that’s fine! I’m cool with that!’”

Grant’s mission is to develop awareness of performance combat training in Australia, if only because higher levels of skill make for much more compelling scenes. As perilous as things might appear to the audience, she says, there’s joy to be had in a great fight.

“It’s gorgeous because everything about you is telling the story that you’re trying to harm or maim the other person, but actually you’ve got the most heightened sense of care for the person you’re working with, and they have for you too. So the whole time you’ve both got a twinkle in your eye,” she says.

“When it comes together and you produce a good illusion, you hear the audience gasp and go: yeah, we nailed that.”