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Despite a powerhouse cast led by Broadway legend Cherry Jones and our own Harry Treadaway, this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Depression-era odyssey by the late Chicagoan theatre-maker Frank Galati is enjoyable for all the wrong reasons.
Carrie Cracknell’s production tracks the impoverished Joad family’s 2,0000-mile flight from Oklahoma to California in a series of picturesque vignettes, studded with folky music by Stuart Earl and Maimuna Memon, who leads the onstage band as they stroll through the action, strumming and fiddling.
Everyone seems clean, healthy and philosophical, winnowed in the gym rather than hollowed by want, and largely untroubled by the fact that life on the road seems to be reducing their numbers one by one.
So for the first half we watch beautifully lit and composed scenarios – including a sumptuously evoked river bathing scene – and splendidly understated acting, with little real sense jeopardy or of life at the edge. When a sense of desperation does ramp up in the second half, the melodramatic scenarios and the stylised dialogue threaten to tip over into parody.
That’s always a potential risk with Steinbeck: a harrowing birth scene during a thunderstorm and a flood is a case in point. Parallels with contemporary wealth inequality, suppression of workers’ rights and forced migration (the latter spelled out in one of Memon’s songs) don’t really land.
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That it still works, and steers just clear of pastiche, is down to the elegance of Cracknell’s direction and Alex Eales’ set. They keep the Lyttelton as a big black box across which the Joads’ overloaded van is laboriously pushed, and where tented Hooverville shantytowns are erected and struck following police raids. This is a tale of constant movement, but Cracknell often allowing exchanges between two figures on stage to unspool at unhurried length.
The cast tend towards understatement too, and if it leaves the show lacking in drama they remain compelling to watch. Jones exudes the warmth and tenacity of old leather as the indefatigable Ma Joad, fiercely telling her family “we are the people that live”, despite copious evidence to the contrary.
Treadaway has a nice line in loose-limbed righteousness as her son Tom, a man “who don’t take nuthin’ from nobody”. Natey Jones brings a contrasting garrulity and fire to Jim Casy, the former preacher who has lost his faith.
Greg Hicks and Michael Shaeffer are highly watchable despite their characters, Pa Joad and Uncle John, being solely defined by defeated stoicism and guilty alcoholism, respectively. And there is a standout performance from Mirren Mack as Rose of Sharon, the Joads’ pregnant daughter, who seems to burn with anxiety under Guy Hoare’s lighting.
She pulls off the show’s final image, which could be woefully over the top, with affecting aplomb. Cherry Jones was given a Broadway-style bouquet on opening night and immediately passed it to her.
