Golden Boy
by Clifford Odets
directed by Sam Yates
Josh O’Connor (The Crown; Challengers) leads the cast in this searing revival of Clifford Odets’ knockout American classic.
1930s New York, at the height of the Depression. Joe Bonaparte is a gifted young violinist with a future in music, until a chance at fame and fortune lures him into the brutal world of professional boxing. He must confront what he’s willing to sacrifice, who he’s willing to become and how to find his place in a world that demands he choose a side.
Brought to life with a live string quartet and filmed live from the Almeida Theatre, Olivier Award-winner Sam Yates (Vanya) directs this propulsive drama exploring ambition, identity, and the high price of success.
Director Sam Yates on Josh O’Connor in Golden Boy taken from AnOther Magazine - September 8th written by Daisy Woodward
"For Golden Boy, written by Clifford Odets and set in Depression-era New York, Yates has enlisted British actor Josh O’Connor to play Joe Bonaparte, a gifted Italian-American violinist who is lured away from music by the fame and fortune promised by professional boxing and its ruthlessly capitalist structures. Yates fell under the play’s spell 12 years ago. “Clifford Odets is hugely underrated in the American canon,” he says of the playwright and screenwriter, who was hailed as one of the defining dramatists of the 1930s. “He writes wonderful characters who are very emotional, very alive. He took the patter of working-class Jewish, Italian and Irish communities in New York and made his own style of language.”
Fascinated by Golden Boy’s essential and enduring question of art versus money, Yates approached Odets’ son, Walt, who offered the director his full support in restaging what is arguably his father’s most personal play. Yates gained access to “the New York Public Library, to Odets’ possessions, the old drafts of the play, all of his to-do lists and his short stories and poems and paintings – everything he created.” Walt had told Yates that his father had spoken often about Golden Boy, explaining that the playwright had felt it was somehow unfinished, and Yates – who “is always trying to explicate what the writer wants and to bring a play’s soul to life,” as he told The Stage in 2017 – was determined to do it justice.
But up until two years ago, he still hadn’t found his Bonaparte. Known for the scruffy, boyish magnetism he’s brought to films like God’s Own Country and La Chimera, Josh O’Connor had long been on Yates’s radar – “I had an instinct for him,” the director tells me. He wrote to O’Connor, sending him the script, and was gratified to receive a swift reply. “We went for breakfast together and talked at length and it seemed that the play was meeting him at a time in his life where he really felt that he could understand Joe.”
It soon became clear that O’Connor, who is returning to live theatre for the first time in more than a decade, possessed all that was required to take on Bonaparte: a Janus-like figure pulled between two versions of himself – the sensitive violinist and the successful prizefighter. “Josh works incredibly hard; he’s incredibly driven. He’s also a very unusual actor because he has an enormous tenderness and yet he has an enormous strength and ruthlessness that he can tap into.” If anyone can draw out such complexity from an actor, it’s Yates, whose precise, almost cinematic direction helped Andrew Scott slip seamlessly between Vanya’s eight characters without the aid of costume changes or make-up."
Much of that alchemy happens in the rehearsal phase, Yates explains – in this instance, within “a very closed room” he established with O’Connor and the other cast members including Hayley Squires, Daniel Mays, Stanley Townsend and Zubin Varla. “I always start the first day of rehearsals with a Rick Rubin quote from The Creative Act. I say, ‘We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play.’ Play is the foundational essence of my rehearsal room, so I work very hard to create an atmosphere where everyone feels able to do that, and to fail, ask questions, offer up ideas. Theatre is a team sport and, with the actors, you’re trying to draw the most personal and detailed performance out of everybody.
Yates’ collaborative instinct extends beyond his cast – the set, sound, lighting and movement often form part of his storytelling grammar. Golden Boy’s creative team includes several long-standing collaborators, among them set and costume designer Rosanna Vize. “The design is extraordinary,” he says. “We’re very much set in the 1930s, but there’s a very strong expressionistic capacity at play – it’s a psychological exploration of this central character.”