Review of the Week: Golden Boy at the Almeida theatre

Almeida theatre, London N1, until 31 October; and in cinemas on 5 November as part of National Theatre Live

It’s odd, these days, to think of Josh O’Connor as the young Prince Charles, the role that made his name in The Crown seven years ago. He has since played mostly Americans, from Challengers to Disclosure Day, and especially men whose cockiness is a brittle mask for anxiety. Now here he is, all muscled up, as Joe Bonaparte, the conflicted violinist-turned-prizefighter in Clifford Odets’s 1937 assault on the American Dream.

Since Covid banjaxed 2020’s National Theatre Romeo & Juliet, Golden Boy is O’Connor’s first proper stage role in 11 years, and it’s an unusual choice – a good play but not a great one. Written for New York’s Group Theatre, famous for both method acting and socialist agitprop, it explores a disgust for the rat race that Odets pursued all the way to The Sweet Smell of Success 20 years later. It’s a period piece, concerned with Italian-American identity and the frantic scrabbling of the Great Depression, and politically didactic, too. Boxing, to Odets, is nothing more than savagery – the violence of capitalism laid bare. But this rare revival by Sam Yates, who won an Olivier for directing Andrew Scott in Vanya, is a fine example of what a director and cast can do to make dated material sing. It’s a five-star production of a three-star play.

We are told that a great fighter, like a great musician, is true to his instincts, but Joe doesn’t know who he is meant to be. With his slugger’s physique and his poet’s eyes, O’Connor is perfectly cast despite being 15 years older than his character. In an elegant prologue, he watches his younger self (Oscar Prout) play the violin Joe has set aside. Then he pulls back a screen to reveal a string quartet before shutting it away again. Isobel Waller-Bridge’s score tracks Joe’s spiritual decline, from plangent romanticism to ominous drones. Joe frames his unlikely pivot to boxing, curling fingers into fists, as a desire for wealth and fame, but he also reveals a deep, incoherent rage. “You can’t get even with people by playing the fiddle,” he snaps.

The drama is therefore a tussle for Joe’s divided soul. His father (Stanley Townsend) is a beautiful idealist. “Music is the great cheer-up,” he declares. “A violinist is a service to humanity.” He loses his son to a radically different Italian father figure, the predatory mobster Eddie Fuseli. Zubin Varla grants Fuseli a fabulously sinister accent and bizarre intonations, like a three-way split between Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and a cartoon snake. The conduit between the two is Joe’s first manager Tom Moody (Daniel Mays), all sweaty, pink-faced desperation as he tries to claw his way back to the good old days before the Wall Street crash. His girlfriend, Lorna, is the only woman on stage and therefore bound to fall for Joe. Hayley Squires gives this “tramp from Newark” a wounded grit, all out of illusions until Joe comes along.

The play is indelibly schematic. The more fights Joe wins, the further he drifts away from his family, from music and from who he should be (but the more compelling O’Connor becomes). At first, scared to bust the hands that once made music, he’s too defensive to be a champion, but gradually the beast emerges. Eventually he’s a blood-stained brute, draped in an American flag and declared “the monarch of the masses”. (With his improbable surname, he is clearly fascism-coded.) “Nothing stands in my way!” he roars. Then, more plaintively: “Nobody gets me.” But why would they when he doesn’t get himself?

Odets influenced Arthur Miller among others, but his work is more era-bound, alternating streetwise quips (“If I had more hair, I’d tear it out”) with finger-wagging denunciations of capitalism’s corruptions. “You wanna fight?” says Mr Bonaparte. “Fight for something. Not for money.” Chekhov’s Gun is the violin that Bonaparte has bought for his son’s 21st birthday – when the case is finally opened, the instrument has transubstantiated into banknotes. Lest you miss the point, Joe’s upstanding brother is a union official.

Yates, though, makes the play bigger than its message – and stranger, too. Rosanna Vize’s naturalistic set (a kitchen, an office) warps into a nightmare during fight scenes that owe something to Raging Bull. Joe’s opponents are represented by a punchbag studded with hidden black-and-white cameras, so that it projects whirling chaos onto the walls as he hammers it into submission and the electronic score clangs like war.

Golden Boy’s climax is abrupt, melodramatic and clangingly symbolic. To quote Michael Caine in Educating Rita, it’s tragic but it’s not a tragedy. Yet once again Yates finds a fix: a haunting, lyrical epilogue of music and candlelight that brings the play full circle. Can the right people elevate a flawed play to greatness? Almost.

Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story. His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize.