A swirling sandstorm and a bare, almost Beckettian backdrop perfectly capture the scorched-earth landscape in the opening pages of John Steinbeck’s 1939 epic, which bodes well for this adaptation. But while Carrie Cracknell’s drama is always big on atmosphere, it wilts into something less bold, more timidly documentary, in its effort to capture the large-scale sense of hope against despair in the US during the Great Depression.
Adapted by Frank Galati, it features the Joad family’s move west from dust-bowl Oklahoma, hoping to find work and survive. Instead, they face exploitation from landowners, hostility from police, migrant destitution and death along the way. The novel is gruelling and you certainly feel a relentless hardship here, but without Steinbeck’s ability to bring a close-up and intimate humanity to these characters.
Slow-paced and with a lack of incident in the first half, it feels more like a stately procession than a moving, breathing piece of theatre. A five-piece band is woven into the drama, and musicians stand among actors with guitar, banjo, accordion, fiddle and harmonica. But this brings yet more stilled atmosphere above action, along with the strains of singer-songwriter Maimuna Memon’s deep rich voice.
We go from the road to tent communities, pitched against the black depths of Alex Eales’s set, but there are too many scenes showing nothing more than the onward march of the journey in the family’s jalopy, which gets spun around the stage. You wish for more intimacy, and simply for more to happen.
The leads seem more like dignified archetypes than flesh and blood people, though they are endearing, from Grampa (Christopher Godwin), who is adamantly against the trip to California, to Ma (Cherry Jones), steely in her desire to keep the family together, and the godless former preacher Jim Casy (Natey Jones).
Tom (Harry Treadaway), who has just finished a jail sentence only to be caught in the prison of poverty, is a capable presence on stage, too, and the pregnant Rose of Sharon (Mirren Mack) is full of hopes and dreams that slowly fade.
The production trains a cinematic kind of long lens on the characters so we see them, too often, from afar with dialogue lifted from Steinbeck’s book, but little building of tension in the story and music cutting in to fill the gaps.
There are some sharply felt moments, mostly later on: the conversation around God versus godlessness, good against sin, which seems so pointed in this shattered world; the women, dreaming of their new lives, from white houses to electric irons. There is the sense of a classic American road trip taking place with a back-screen showing a strip of sky that goes black at night and glows red with sunsets, reminding us there is beauty in the bleakest times.
We see this family’s poverty from the outside, too, in the cold appraisals of those they pass on their migration, whose words contain a dehumanising gaze.
The second half brings more drama as the family contend with everything from childbirth to flooding. The final scene of the book must surely be one of the most difficult to pull off on stage, with its mix of horror and hope, the sense of life struggling against death, and sacrifice against survival. This, at least, is pulled off, emotional drama infusing the visual effect in a way that is too often missing from what has preceded it.
• At the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London, until 14 September
