Josh O’Connor has the coiled, restless energy of a young Richard Gere in this pulpy, punchy boxing drama by Clifford Odets, written and set in the Depression-hit New York of 1937. He’s Joe Bonaparte, a young Italian-American torn between his impecunious true calling, music, and the easier, dirtier money to be made with his fists.
Though O’Connor, returning to the stage after ten years of glitzy screen roles, is the top draw on the bill, Sam Yates’s production is a full-throated ensemble piece. It leans with relish into both the wise-guy humour and the overwrought emotion of the script.
Hayley Squires, Daniel Mays, Zubin Varla and the rest of the cast – even those in token roles - go off like firecrackers after a lit match has been dropped into the box. A string quartet, periodically revealed in a cupboard above Rosanna Vize’s evocative set and playing delicate compositions by Isobel Waller-Bridge, underlines the conflict between lofty art and brutal, vulgar capitalism.
Odets came up through NY’s Method-oriented Group Theatre and was hugely popular and influential in his time. His socially-conscious dramas are rarely done now in the UK, squeezed out on all sides by Eugene O’Neil, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Golden Boy marks a clear development of the leftist, underdog politics of his early works into something more poetic and psychologically profound.
And also, surely, a metaphor for his own life: Odets was lured by the Hollywood dollar from 1936 (he wrote The Sweet Smell of Success among much else: the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink is based on him). He and Elia Kazan tried to game the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities, but both were shunned for naming names; Odets died of stomach cancer at 57.
Here, Joe is an angry kid from a loving but motherless home, his doting, soulful father (Stanley Townsend) a fruit salesman and his brother (Richard Fleeshman) a firebrand union organiser. He learned to fight because his ethnicity, his squint and his violin case made him a target. While he and many New Yorkers face hardscrabble lives, they see skyscrapers and sports cars all around them. Joe busts into the fight game through technical brilliance, but true success requires him to risk ruining his hands.
The opposite poles of Joe’s life are starkly – you could say obviously – delineated. Compared to the warmth of the kitchen where his dad banters in broken English with his friend Carp (Nicholas Woodeson), the boxing world is a smoky, seamy pit. Joe’s manager Tom Moody (Mays) is a ball of sweaty desperation, conducting an affair with his sardonic and borderline alcoholic assistant Lorna.
Hayley Squires is magnificent as this bruised, lone femme fatale, whose whiplash one liners conceal secret vulnerability. “At the moment this woman belongs in the bar,” is her smart exit line from yet another sexist harangue. Naturally, Joe falls for her.
The iniquities of the sports world are further underlined by the appearance of Eddie Fuseli (Varla), a chilly, fastidious gay gangster in natty clothes and built-up shoes, who wants “a piece” of Joe in more ways than one. In case we really don’t get it, Joe is haunted by visions of his innocent boyhood self.
O’Connor apparently learned to box for this part and his lean, taut body is a physical metaphor for Joe’s hunger and his pent-up resentment. The fight scenes are expressionistically conducted through a suspended punchbag with a camera concealed in it, reeling and whirling as the blows land. A scene where Joe mounts the bag, bucking and howling, could be comic, but absolutely isn’t.
Indeed, for a contemporary audience, the heightened dialogue and the sweat-and-whiskey fug of Golden Boy threaten constantly to slip into parody, but Yates and his cast hold it together with sheer conviction and good faith. O’Connor’s presence on the fight card means the Almeida run is pretty much sold out. Let’s hope it transfers. Because if you embrace it, this show is a knockout.
Until 31 Oct, Almeida.co.uk
