FringeReview UK 2026
Golden Boy
Almeida Theatre
Genre: American Theater, Drama, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre, Tragedy
Venue: Almeida Theatre, Islington
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Clifford Odets’ 1937 play Golden Boy, revived at the Almeida is directed by Sam Yates till October 31.
An outstanding revival of a playwright whose works should be far more visible.
Review
The ghost of a gift departing is inscribed in this production. If Odets has written an elegy for himself and his own conflicted talent – selling out to Hollywood to fund his own theatre – it could hardly be more underscored here: in this tale of a gifted violinist Joe whose inchoate desire to be both the same and extraordinary has pushed him to renounce the violin for the boxing ring. Clifford Odets’ 1937 play Golden Boy, revived at the Almeida is directed by Sam Yates till October 31.
Odets later slightly derided the plot as “improbable” at this point. But the stark metaphors hold and in this production it’s metaphor – above all aural metaphor – that helps confirm this revival as outstanding.
Indeed small touches throughout – opening the violin case to discover something else – are certainly non-naturalistic: not at all Odet’s overt intentions. But that’s what you can do with improbable.
Josh O’Connor leads the cast as Joe Bonaparte. With such dual heritage Joe understandably pulls his punches: a superb “scientific” observer of others he’s protecting his hands. His new managers want to know why. Everything including a young woman is thrown in to fathom then change Joe’s approach. When his father shows up Joe’s secret is out. But not his mystery.
But Joe’s tragedy is not so much being pushed by the aggression of the manager and backer he has, as influenced by the born killer of the man who muscles in. Dogs and their owners. And it’s the most vicious of the two who at the climax excitedly calls Joe “Golden Boy”: with every connotation.
Boxing had rapidly become one of those rags to riches fantasies the 1930s were so obsessed with. The 1931 film The Champ also shows tragic contradictions. It might even have seeded in Odets’ imagination the dramatic paradox of losing by winning.
Odets’ play is more than anything though a family-centred play. Rosanna Vise’s set and costumes lit by James Farncombe reinforce the naturalist pale-green set’s feel as domestic: the foreground used for other moments. And the last image of a couple being just that: homely. Joe’s home kitchen is shown centre stage and stage left is Tom’s office where he and others seem to live. Opposite are spectral mementoes of Joe’s house including a piano.
Though personally assured and socialist brother Frank Bonaparte (a warm, mediating performance from Richard Fleeshman) mentions war clouds and fascists, predicting the U.S. at war (something most Americans thought wouldn’t happen) the political is downplayed. Frank’s political act is to refuse Fuseli’s offer point blank. Mr Bonaparte’s hostility to the sinister Fuseli is mutual but he too stands up to threats of violence.
Mr Bonaparte (Stanley Townsend), carrier of a fragile vessel if Old World values has bought his son a top-of-the-line violin for his 21st. Which he doesn’t give him then. Mr Carp (Nicholas Woodeson, later briefly a distraught trainer, Baker) and Bonaparte perform touching duets on their old European values. Which include enough to live well. Townsend and Woodeson are exquisite, and show Odets’ range.
It’s clear anger plays its part in Joe’s did affection from his true gift for this brutal and far briefer one. In all this there are good and bad angels. Joe’s most perceptive is his trainer Tokyo (Jason Barnett).
“You fight with hate like Fuseli. Find what or who you love” he counsels in one of the most telling lines. Barnett’s performance glows like a small lantern of humanity in the gathering dark around Joe. But he’s not alone.
With Lorna Moon (Hayley Squires) the degree of self-defence and hard-talking initially rivals Joe’s. You can see both these two are cock-eyed – the soubriquet aimed at Joe – and take a while to unpeel. “I don’t like you” Lorna initially declares: certainly one kind of left-field-hook. There’s half-lights of admission and the acting here is phenomenally layered and intimate between Squires and O’Connor. Even when they have admitted feelings, Lorna’s warmth means she can’t abandon Tom who truly loves her. But she finds she can’t abandon Joe either. Squires gives a performance both unpredictable and thrilling.
Eddie Fuseli (Zubin Varla) the gay killer who’s happy to pull guns at men and women yet fondle Joe with silks, only arrives near halfway through to muscle in. Varla gives a chilling performance. He doesn’t like the word “rats” used to describe his kind of business. But vermin is how Varla realises his seething psychopathy. It’s the more ambiguous Tom Moody (Daniel Mays) and his fight arranger partner Roxy Gottlieb (David Ganly) who certainly don’t have Joe’s best interests at heart. But they’re not lacking heart entirely. Again with Mays and Ganly you’re treated to a thoroughly relatable world, one where their drives and desperation mesh almost to sympathy.
Mays’ Tom is ambiguously warm. His love for Lorna is sincere (insomuch as this man of 42 feels lucky to find a much younger woman); but parried till his wife gives him a divorce. There’s desire to be loved by Joe despite himself and his disappointment and anger when both Joe and eventually Lorna turn away is painful. He sees Joe as Fuseli’s creature. But Tokyo, deft in psychology as he is in massage knows where the true pressure points are. There’s brutal fights with Kate Waters as boxing arranger too. Though the boxing is mimicked on a punchbag. It’s remarkably physical theatre, everything floating as it were in Imogen Knight’s movement. Patrick Martins playing boxers Pepper White and Lewis is on magnificent braggadocio form. Oliver Ryan acts as a gadfly, as Mickey, Drake and particularly sports reporter Driscoll, who gives a an outraged reaction to what he can see Joe’s become.
O’Connor here gives the performance of a shivering giant. One who’ll shiver apart. His raw aspiration, his holding back for the lst of his talent, his colonising by first one then another manager, an the provocateur then potential saviour Lorna, all these visibly act on O’Connor: just as blow land on his body. Through the second half we see how his body’s a brutalised analogue to his mind. Like all he speaks with a nasal Italo-Brooklyn twang, Newark, or more echt-Italianate accent to make the three most prominent: some of which is strikingly thick (credit to dialect coach William Conacher here).
O’Connor slides back the panel on occasion to reveal a string quartet. Isobel Waller-Bridge’s music played by a live string quartet amplified at terraced levels of audibility by Dan Balfour’s sound design is at the heart of this and in fact Odets might have applauded this, considering what he later did with the play.
In Waller-Bridge’s clever dig at profundity they open and close with late Beethoven. His confident E flat Op 127 opening, and Op 132 with the movement on the composer’s recovery from sickness. In Joe’s case that’s not far wrong. In between there’s clever shivers and chords of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden struck through: most affectingly with Lorna singing ‘Help me make it through the Night’.
The boy playing young Joe (either Oscar Prout or Anton Vehring) seems assured in tuning a violin and acts as a poignant might-have-been. Music is indeed the last thing to leave us and as the haunting light draws down you wonder at Mr Bonaparte’s word “waste”. That might seem a premature elegy for Odets too. But after 1941 he never wrote regularly for the theatre again. His last hit was Country Girl from 1950, and last play in 1954. He died just 57 in 1963, having nearly completed a musical version of – piquantly – Golden Boy. Which went on the year after, with Sammy David Jr. Surely this musically expanded version would have pleased him. An outstanding revival of a playwright whose works should be far more visible.
String Quartet Members: Roman Lytwyniw, Musical Director/Violin 1, Anna Cooper Violin 2/Piao, Georgia Russell, Viola, Niki Moosavi Cello.
Casting Director Jim Carnahan CSA, Amy Beadel CDG, Music Supervisor and Orchestrator Jerome van den Berghe, Orchestral Manager David Gallagher, Costume Supervisor Sabia Smith, Dialect Coach William Conacher, Associate Director Yasmin Hafesi
Production Manager Tom Hortion, Production Assistant Frances Bennett, CSM Lizzie Chapman, DSM Lorna Seymour, ASM Maddie Sidi, Stage Management Placement Harry Maltby.
