Clifford Odets proved himself a contender during the Great Depression but has grown unfamiliar on this side of the Atlantic. Here is a rare outing for his 1937 drama, bolstered by the stage return of Josh O’Connor after a decade on screen. He plays Joe Bonaparte, a New York violinist who, after years of careful endeavour, dismisses a precarious career in music to turn a quick buck as a boxer – risking his precious hands in the process.
He is spurred on by a zealous manager, Tom, who even deploys his own lover, Lorna, to keep him satisfied. O’Connor transforms seamlessly as Bonaparte who hardens, bout by bout, with a resolve he deems fitting for the desperate 30s. His professional success and emotional spiral are observed by an anxious father, who irresistibly hymns music over money, and the ruthless gangster who has bought a stake in him.
It is a play of opposing forces: cynicism and optimism, instinct and intellect, defence and offence. Staging Golden Boy is principally a question of strings and ropes: how to capture Joe’s gift for the violin and his force in the ring. Sam Yates’s revival adds a prologue of stillness, with O’Connor watching a young boy play the instrument. As the music swells, he draws back the shutters on Rosanna Vize’s half-office, half-home set to reveal musical director Roman Lytwyniw’s elevated string quartet before picking up the violin delicately himself.
Rouben Mamoulian’s 1939 film version added convivial impromptu music recitals to bring Joe’s family together; Yates shows music as a deeply individual, transportive passion preserved from youth, with the quartet often playing Isobel Waller-Bridge’s compositions as if in Joe’s mind (as well as adding suspenseful flourishes). It reinforces the purity of his musical pursuits but O’Connor carries enough boyish innocence – even at 36 rather than the character’s 21 years – to make the addition of a child actor extraneous, although Oscar Prout brings grace to that part on press night.
As for the boxing, it almost entirely happens offstage in Odets’ script, which has the beats but not the usual arc of a sporting drama and whose fights are chiefly domestic and internal. A heavy punch bag is intermittently suspended, concealing a video camera that – in Jack Phelan’s video design – gives us a spinning almost newsreel-esque view of the action with each thump. It’s a handsome effect, even if these stylised sequences – and some increasingly expressionist movement direction from Imogen Knight – can jar with what otherwise plays out solidly as a period piece. A sensual episode drawing a violinist into the boxing arena alongside Joe is more awkwardly done.
By 1937 Odets was a seasoned Hollywood screenwriter and the play has a hard-boiled poetry and deadpan humour, with the kind of polished lines that fly in a film noir or screwball comedy but are difficult to land on stage. Zubin Varla detonates some as the beady, macabre gunman Fuseli. Playing Tom, Daniel Mays brings a hustle akin to his Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, sometimes literally licking his lips while relishing the dialogue. He captures Odets’ description of an explosive yet vulnerable man while, as Lorna, Hayley Squires perfects her character’s hardness acquired, as the playwright put it, “more from necessity than choice”. She mirrors O’Connor’s tussle between passion and pragmatism. When Joe and Lorna fall for each other, it’s cleverly done partly through music – as she sings Kris Kristofferson’s Help Me Make It Through the Night – but it’s a tall order to build a tragedy around their romance and the production never manages it despite a set of compelling performances and a new epilogue.
With Golden Boy, Odets moved from agitprop to melodrama and the play doesn’t fully succeed as a greater social tragedy either, even with the pointed observations of Stanley Townsend as Joe’s father and Richard Fleeshman as Joe’s union man brother. It’s a play heavy with death – even a violin case is called a coffin for a baby – and we hear a bloodlust roar of the crowd for Joe’s fights. But you don’t sense those other lives, across a city and a nation brought to its knees.
At the Almeida theatre, London, until 31 October, and in cinemas worldwide through NT Live from 5 November
