Golden Boy, written by Clifford Odets in 1937, feels like a Norman Wisdom movie. A talented boxer wants to become a great violinist so he refuses to throw heavy punches in case he damages his fingers. The boxer, Joe, comes from a loving family who urge him to pursue a musical career but he meets a greedy, fast-talking agent, Tom, who promises him wealth and fame in the ring.
To prise Joe away from his family, Tom encourages his adorable girlfriend, Lorna, to use her influence on him. Lorna promptly falls in love with Joe and the romantic triangle adds heaps of conflict to his career as a boxing champ. Josh O’Connor, looking more like a Hungarian philosopher than a streetfighter, brings an arrogant physicality to the role of Joe. Hayley Squires plays the vacillating Lorna with the right mixture of self-doubt and naked desire. Daniel Mays delivers a credible performance as Tom, the twitchy hoodlum with a heart of gold.
Odets dislikes writing simple stories and he prefers a plot that heaves from one impossible dilemma to the next. Unmarried Lorna loves Tom but feels an animal attraction to Joe but she later returns to Tom while wondering if Joe might have been a better bet. Her ding-ding indecision gives her many opportunities to deliver lyrical speeches of tormented self-enquiry.
All the characters are faced with problems that need to be addressed with a soliloquy and the script turns into a sequence of grand, set-piece speeches. It feels like an opera without any singing. Roles like these are popular with actors and they delight playgoers who appreciate outpourings of raw emotion. But the characters feel like figures in a play rather than real-life human beings. And the plot develops so ponderously that it almost turns into cement. Indecisive Odets can’t find a proper conclusion to the story so he chucks in a car crash at the end to solve all his problems at once.
Sam Yates directs the show as if dreaming of a larger space. He lines up six playing areas across the stage: a piano room, a tenement staircase, a kitchen, an office, a physio suite and a corridor leading to a boxing venue. Each little area is too narrow to contain all the actors and they have to huddle together like gamblers playing poker in a telephone kiosk. Many audio-visual layers are added as well. A child actor, as Young Joe, wanders in and out of the action, fiddling with props and bits of furniture. A hidden string quartet plays non-stop music from inside a special nook with a foldaway screen. The boxing matches are represented by a huge punchbag fitted with a spy-cam that projects the action on to the back wall.
It’s a bit overdone, a bit pretentious too. Disputes about this play will rumble on. Those who enjoy a gripping yarn told in a lean, straightforward manner will find it heavy going. Hardcore theatre fans will adore its richness, its visual ambition, its daring symbolism and its fearless desire to plumb the depths of the human heart.
Darkling is a monologue about the Bhopal disaster written by Titas Halder, an associate director at the Donmar Warehouse. His script skilfully evokes the horrors of life for impoverished Indians in the 1980s. The narrator, ‘She’, is an illiterate slum girl who can’t attend school because her lazy, widowed father compels her to fetch and carry for him. The local boys jeer at her dark skin as she draws water from a dirty well reserved for lower-caste Indians. Meanwhile her adored sister, raped by an uncle, is married off to a violent brute of a husband who forces her to run away and live in a distant city. And yet ‘She’ hopes to transcend her destiny and become a scientist. It sounds like a fantasy dreamed up by a PR agency for a UN relief scheme.
The plot develops so ponderously that it almost turns into cement
Meanwhile, American investors are building a chemical factory whose skeletal frame looms ominously over the city. On the night of 3 December 1984, a cloud of deadly gas kills thousands of residents but ‘She’ avoids the disaster by a miracle. The scenes of chaos and devastation seem anti-climactic compared with her previous sufferings. And ‘She’ is incapable of appreciating the economic causes of the catastrophe. To her, the Americans are a gang of capitalist parasites who built a lucrative factory and then cleared off after causing thousands of deaths. No mention is made of the $470 million compensation paid in 1989, and we aren’t told how the money was spent.
Matthew Xia’s classy production does more than justice to the material. And he directs Linnea Berthelsen to play ‘She’ in a BBC newsreader’s accent. Odd but it works. A UK tour is planned and the show will prosper in urban areas with large Indian populations.
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