"If I was alone I could live so easy," says George to Lennie as the slow-witted giant lands him in trouble again. But the truth of John Steinbeck's heartbreaking drama is that being a team is what sets these men apart. We like to think atomisation is a product of the post-Thatcher era, but in the California of the Depression, there is nothing more suspicious for Steinbeck's farmhands than the partnership of George and Lennie. Their friendship is a subversive act.
Of Mice and Men is a tragedy not simply of a gentle giant who doesn't know his own strength - though that is what we mourn in the closing moments of Ian Grieve's superb production - but of a whole society that has become alienated from itself. The barley workers take pride in their self-sufficiency, but as individuals they are as unfulfilled as Francesca Dymond's newlywed farmer's wife, the lone woman in a loveless, masculine world of violence and whoring.
George and Lennie's fantasy of a farm of their own is a metaphor for the resolution they will never achieve. The poignancy of Steinbeck's vision is that they come closer to it than anyone.
To a bittersweet soundtrack of slide guitar, played by Stuart Graham, Jimmy Chisholm and Liam Brennan are a riveting double act. Chisholm's George is the plain-talking working man, half ashamed of his nurturing instincts. Brennan's Lennie is less docile than driven, single-minded more than simple-minded; his flaw is a childlike lack of self-awareness. They are as close as this hard-bitten landscape comes to love. The supporting cast are similarly flawless: an ensemble of lonely individuals, living from one paycheque to the next, eventually to destroy the one thing that should have redeemed them.
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