Sam Yates

I'm Lucy.

This is the Picturehouse podcast and today we are chatting to the cast of Golden Boy, directed by Sam Yates, who you may remember from Vanya with Andrew Scott.

We are a few weeks into the run of Golden Boy at London's Almeida Theatre.

It's A classic, but not too often staged, Clifford Odette's play follows the 21-year-old Joe Bonaparte, who is a violinist, who loves his craft, he loves to play, but he hasn't found a lot of success.

The play is written by Ava Pickett, who everyone is talking about as a young rising star, quite rightly, following her breakout play 1536, which had acclaimed runs at the Almeida and then in the West End earlier this year.

Bloodsport was actually written a few years ago, before 1536, but is having a proper production here at Stratford East, directed by the new artistic director there, Lisa Sperling, and with a very good cast, including Michelle Dockery, Laura Aikman.

So this is an event of some note, I think.

The play is actually fully titled Bloodsport After Helen of Troy, and as that suggests, it is an imagining of what might befall Helen of Troy after she returns from the battle, but set in modern-day Britain, and specifically in Essex.

It's based on Jerome K. Jerome's classic comic novel, published way back in 1889, about three men and a dog.

going on a two-week boating holiday up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford.

Programming directed by The Rose is artistic director Christopher Hayden.

To celebrate the story's local origins, this is a pantomime-like knockabout production at which the audience I attended with had a very good time indeed.

But neither did any of the actors.

The only one who knew about this was Sam Yates, who's the director who's been trying to get this play on for about 12 years.

He is still big in the US.

He's massive.

but that's a really good summing up of of the kind of contrasting moods of the play as well like that's

exactly it this is what it's about

Yeah, but I don't think that Sam, I don't know whether it's inherent in the play itself or I don't know whether it's something that Sam Yates couldn't quite sort of smooth out.

But it felt like, you know, you watch an Arthur Miller play and they are so, so exquisitely constructed and finely tooled.

So it's really about the lure of mercantilism versus art.

And it's beautifully directed by Sam Yates, who did the Andrew Scott's Solovania in a kind of quasi-expressionistic way where you're Inside Josh O'Connor's, it feels like you're inside his head.

You're almost inside the punching bag when he's working out in the ring.

It's got a superb cast, even by the Almeida standards.