Review: GOLDEN BOY, starring Josh O'Connor, Almeida Theatre

In an era when some men (Jake and Logan Paul, KSI and others) already possessed of fame and fortune, climb into the ring to garner even more - and nobody ducks between the ropes without serious courage - Clifford Odets’ 1937 play, Golden Boy, felt a little of its time. These days, the fast-track to money and the sweet rush of social media clicks is more likely found in Reality TV or an Onlyfans account. The point holds though, the dilemma facing Joe Bonaparte - what do you lose and what do you gain? And how do you measure it at all? Ultimately, what is a life actually for?

Josh O’Connor, buffed up and convincing as a boxer if not as a 20 year old, plays Joe, the brooding child prodigy on the violin, who spies a short cut to the cars and cribs he craves through his hands, this time punching faces not strumming strings. His father (Stanley Townend, all disappointed asides leavened by his genuine love for his talented son) buys him a top of the range instrument, but Joe rejects it. His coveted Duesenberg coupé lies at the end of his fists not his fingers.

So he goes off on the road with his hustling manager, Tom Moody (Daniel Mays, going through his Nathan Detroit stuff from the Bridge Theatre’s Guys and Dolls, but without the charm) and Moody’s mistress, Lorna Moon - a tough-talking Hayley Squires. She has an eye for Joe and he an eye for her and, well, you can guess where that love triangle goes.

Meanwhile, Joe won’t punch, at least not hard enough to hurt his hands his doubts about embracing his new life evident, until the gangster Eddie Fuseli enters the scene (a chilling Zubin Varla). He intimidates the bumbling Moody, paws a bit at Joe and convinces him that the big payday is just round the corner. Joe is all in and the knockouts follow - with concomitant damage to his artiste’s hands.

In case you were in any doubt as to the theme of wasting a God given talent for the arts honed over ten years of disciplined practice in favour of the shiny baubles of consumerism, at least a couple of speeches simply tell us. Of course, the audience were still 20 years and a World War away from Elvis, James and Marlon inventing The Teenager in the mid-50s, so maybe that needing spelling out then - but maybe not now.

But that’s hardly the most heavy-handed element of a play that lacks nuance and has not aged well. Dodgy characters hang around Joe, young boxers, then as now, a meal ticket for ruthless men and women, until they lose and they’re dropped like soiled nappy. With the New York accents, Italian gesturing and Button Men outfits, they’re caricatured within an ace of pantomime. And Squires, the only woman on stage, has to navigate a path between a woman unsure of herself and what she really wants from a hard life, and vamping it up as a siren-like femme fatale - an impossible task really. 

The first 90 minutes or so (it’s a long evening) hold one’s attention and the interventions of a string quartet - music by Isobel Waller-Bridge - perched above Rozanna Vize’s curiously domestic set acts as an obvious, if effective, “Here’s what you would have won” motif. But the closing 30 minutes or so descends into melodrama, punctuated by so much shouting that I can’t have been alone in letting it just wash over me. Why director, Sam Yates, went for that approach, I do not know, but nothing gathers diminishing returns like an ear-battering in the theatre.

I was reminded, in very different circumstances, of the life and death of Ricky Hatton, the smart but fragile, much loved Manchester brawler, who could not cope with the contradictions of life inside and outside the ring. So too the Reality TV stars, eaten up and spat out by celebrity culture’s voracious maw. The play has certainly has relevance today.

But, despite all that talent on stage and a superstar draw on the playbill, the production fails to establish a place in our hearts, the care we need to feel for those lost in capitalism’s seductive grip just not breaching the fourth wall. Absent that, you’re just left with another bout of ear abuse on the Tube home and an enhanced admiration for Raging Bull, Rocky and Creed.   

Golden Boy at the Almeida Theatre until 31 October

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