Mind the Gap is a company that specialises in giving performers with and without learning disabilities an equal platform. Though the balance between doing good work and producing good work is not always easy to achieve, Mike Kenny's three-handed adaptation of Steinbeck's novella plays to the company's strengths, as the figure of the gentle giant Lennie is arguably the first fully realised account of a character with learning disabilities in literature.
Lennie has a fondness for soft objects and a helpless ability to crush the things he loves: pet mice, small puppies and ultimately his dreams of owning his own ranch with his friend George. Robert Ewens's performance is heartbreakingly good, combining the soul of a child with the body mass of an all-in-wrestler. Jez Colborne's George provides the perfect partner, expressing the combination of patience, affection and frustration of what in modern terms would be called a carer.
Mike Kenny has an uncommon knack of encapsulating the spirit of a work while discarding any extraneous material. Here the action is contained in the tawdry bordello of a one-horse town where a traumatised George has arrived, claiming that he only wants to talk: Jessica May Buxton's tender-hearted prostitute becomes a complicit auditor.
Tim Wheeler's production is a model of economy, whose moods and vistas are enhanced by William Simpson's evocative video projections and a honky-tonk sound design by Si McGrath. If there's a tendency for the actors to occasionally overplay their roles, it's an understandable fault: like Steinbeck's hero, it's a production which almost doesn't know its own strength.
