Director Sam Yates on Josh O’Connor in Golden Boy

Sam Yates pored over playwright Clifford Odets’ drafts, to-do lists and old possessions in preparation for Golden Boy but it wasn’t until he found his Joe Bonaparte – Josh O’Connor – that he could stage it

Sam Yates is an actor’s director. “I nearly always start with a single actor,” he tells AnOther, speaking over the phone a few days before the opening of his latest play, Golden Boy, at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. “I’ll get to know them and they’ll get to know me, and if there’s chemistry and a kind of shared question, that’s how a project nearly always begins.” 

Yates’ work spans film and television, too – his credits include the 2024 thriller Magpie, starring Daisy Ridley, and the BBC’s Towards Zero with Anjelica Huston. On stage, he most recently directed Andrew Scott in the Olivier Award-winning Vanya, a powerful reimagining of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya as a one-man play.

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.”

Music, too, is woven into the fabric of the production. Yates says that Odets was trying to structure Golden Boy like a Beethoven sonata, giving the scenes a musical sense of rhythm and movement. And in this production, a live string quartet will appear on stage. “Without spoiling too much, the first violinist is a brilliant musician called Roman and he and Josh have a very similar likeness,” he says, explaining that the quartet represents Joe’s alternate life in music. “They’re a physical manifestation of his relationship to music, and they’re only ever present when Joe is in an active dilemma: ‘Shall I carry on with music? Or shall I box and risk breaking my hands and never playing again?’”

And what about O’Connor himself, I ask? The day before Yates and I speak, the company had its first tech rehearsal – the first chance to see the threads of the tapestry come together to form Joe Bonaparte’s world. “Josh’s stage presence has a very special quality that’s kind of undefinable. As a person, he’s incredibly kind, intelligent and thoughtful. And when he switches into his role, it’s remarkable. He’s still very much Josh, but there’s something that happens where he transforms before your eyes. I can say that for all the actors, but the difference with Josh is that we began so early – and seeing him build this role has been absolutely amazing … This is Josh O’Connor or Hayley Squires at the peak of their powers at this point in their life. Theatre is an ancient art form, and you are watching someone sculpt something right now in front of you. It’s never been seen before and will never be seen again, so it’s a very special insight into an artist.”

Golden Boy runs from 8 September until 31 October at The Almeida Theatre.