Theatre review: Golden Boy

One of the most successful and memorable shows of the Almeida's Gooldilocks era was Rebecca Frecknall's rediscovery of Summer and Smoke, which took an obscure Tennessee Williams play and revealed it as equal to some of the playwright's most famous works. It came to mind with the penultimate show programmed by Goold, as director Sam Yates has spotted the potential for a striking night at the theatre in a 1937 play by the influential but largely forgotten American playwright Clifford Odets. Where the comparison doesn't hold up is in convincing us that Golden Boy itself should be reevaluated as some kind of masterpiece. The production marks a return to the stage for Josh O'Connor - when I first saw him in 2013's Farragut North I called him "one to watch" and he's one of those cases who's proven me right and then some, as people have very much enjoyed watching him in the intervening 13 years.

The fact that as the titular Golden Boy, Joe Bonaparte, he spends a lot of time in just boxing shorts showing off an especially buff new physique explains some of that, but he also leads the show with the kind of quiet charisma that he's shown from the start.

Joe is an aspiring boxer who talks his way into a match and proves to be a natural talent - but one who's holding something back. His new manager Tom (Transphobia Ltd Employee Daniel Mays) discovers that as a boy Joe was an aspiring violin player whose father (Stanley Townsend) still harbours a hope that he might make his living through music rather than violence. The question arises of whether Joe is pulling his punches so as not to damage his hands, but as more people get invested in his success, the pressure increases for him to go all in.

In a less convincing subplot, he's also contending with falling for Tom's girlfriend Lorna (Hayley Squires,) but if the play has something of significance to say it's in its understated reflection of the Depression Era it's set in, and Joe's pragmatic view of what can actually make him enough money to get by even if it's brutal, versus the nobler but less realistic dreams of his father, who immigrated from Italy but whose accent immigrated from Transylvania.

That's the last time the word "understated" applies to Odets' play though, a pretty straightforward melodrama that's not so much heavy-handed as it is perfunctory in the way it ticks through the points it's trying to make, culminating in an ending with all the subtlety of "Note: Poochie died on the way back to his home planet." It does make what Yates, his cast and creatives have turned the play into even more extraordinary though: At its heart Yates' production is one that's haunted, not by ghosts but by other possibilities and missed opportunities.

So the play opens with the child Joe (Oscar Prout or Anton Vehring) playing the violin, and he often remains on stage at the same time as O'Connor, reminding him of who he once wanted to be. The music itself also hants him: Rosanna Vize's set has a balcony on which a string quartet plays, and Joe has to close the shutters on them just to drown the sound out; sometimes Roman Lytwyniw's lead violin still follows him out onto the stage though, impossible to quite get rid of.

The fight scenes are also done in a dreamlike expressionist style: Imogen Knight's movement direction and Kate Waters' fight direction places O'Connor and Patrick Martins either side of a punchbag filled with cameras; in one of the most striking visual motifs Jack Phelan's video design projects the spinning images of Joe's mental and physical anguish onto the walls.

Being able to play some of the melodrama for comedy also helps the evening work - I strongly suspect that Zubin Varla's scene-stealing comedy gangster Eddie Fuseli is written as an entirely serious gangster (I was genuinely surprised that Bonaparte Sr survived after Fuseli heavy-handedly said he'll shoot dead any obstacle to getting what he wants) but his scenes now have a surreal tinge to the menace. Jason Barnett as the salt-of-the-earth trainer and Richard Fleeshman as Joe's brother, who's only really there to deliver the clumsy dénouement, also do a lot with thankless roles.

So Golden Boy, as Yates delivers it at least, is a pretty strange experience - a great piece of theatre and an absorbing couple of hours well worth seeing, that still leaves you with no illusion that the raw material was any kind of masterpiece. The Almeida's really made a silk purse out of a sow's ear or, as one of the characters mangles the phrase in a way that probably says a lot about Odets' writing in general: "He's made a purse out of, er, someone's ear."

Golden Boy by Clifford Odets is booking until the 31st of October at the Almeida Theatre (returns only.)

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.