It begins with the plaintive sounds of a saw being played by a man whose face – a cragged rock of sorrow and loss – is pierced by light. It ends with a starkly simple act of compassion as a grief-stricken woman feeds a starving man. In between, there are impressive moments in Abbey Wright’s ambitious staging of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel about the Joad family, poor midwesterners evicted from the land they farmed as tenants. Along with hundreds of thousands of others in dustbowl America, they set off on the long trek to the promised land of California.
The best bits are often the simplest: the family staring out from the stage at their first tantalising glimpse of this green promised land, which turns out to be a mirage as they find themselves unwelcome, exploited and moved on; the way the 50-strong community cast gradually infiltrate the group so that 21st-century T-shirts and trainers limp step-by-step with 1930s boots and aprons. It offers parallels to our own era of mechanisation, layoffs and the displacement of people through manmade disaster.
But if the Joads are burdened by poverty and hopes for the future, they are also burdened by a production that often gets in the way of them telling their story. The music and songs – from Matt Regan, whose Greater Belfast was a strange marvel – are fantastic: suffused with harsh, discordant, plaintive sounds that reflect the landscape and the characters’ inner lives. But the way they are used muffles the text and slows the action. During the lumbering first half, you wonder whether anyone will ever get to California.
A design featuring two platforms becomes increasingly cumbersome, the moody lighting sometimes leaves actors entirely in the dark, and in an evening of undefined performances there is a fatal lack of pace and momentum. It’s good to see a classic story given a contemporary theatre aesthetic, but it is mere decoration unless it goes hand in hand with great storytelling and in-depth characterisations.
• At Nuffield, Southampton, until 25 March. Box office: 023-8067 1771. Then at Royal & Derngate, Northampton, 9 to 20 May; West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, 24 May to 10 June.
