Steinbeck’s epic novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and this 1988 adaptation, originally made for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, gained a Tony when it transferred to Broadway. It offers a picture of '30s America that turns the American Dream into a nightmare in its tale of the effect of ecological disaster and venal exploitation on one farming family turned migrant.
Carrie Cracknell’s production open with a succession of figures caught in a shard of light as they struggle against primeval forces. There is no dialogue, no explanation, but it is a graphic evocation of the wind and the sand of the dustbowl erosion that made farming impossible for Ma and Pa Joad and their family who are at the heart of this saga and for thousands like them.
Pa is eager for them to pack everything onto their truck and start the trek along Route 66 from Oklahoma to California, but eldest son Tom is missing. He is serving a prison sentence for manslaughter: he killed a man who had knifed him. In fact, he has been released on parole and is on his way to them only to find they have been evicted, though discovers them at his Uncle John’s house.
Tom is the play’s salt-of-the-earth Everyman: caring, his heart in the right place but quick-tempered. Harry Treadaway gives him a simple honesty; you can’t help but like him. As his father, clinging to his California dream, Greg Hicks’s Pa is gruffly determined, he blames himself later, but it is Cherry Jones’s matriarchal Ma who keeps the family going, carefully hiding upsetting setbacks, always supportive—only the audience see her own grief.
Packing a book of nearly 700 pages into three hours of theatre (including interval) is no easy task, and this adaption becomes somewhat episodic, the scene changes bridged by songs from Maimuna Lemon. They make a nice noise but slow things down and add little: it is not until after the interval that they have any proper lyrics.
The first half is largely taken up with the Joads’ long journey. A traveller in the other direction warns them that things out West aren’t what they are expecting: there are too many migrants, little work, even less pay—but they still carry on. Somehow, their heavily loaded truck is packed with belongings and a dozen family, including pregnant Rose of Sharon (Mirren Mack) and her husband and plus the former preacher Jim Casy, with whom Tom teamed up while hitch-hiking home. There is a stop at a gas station, so it is running on petrol, though the staging has actors pushing it around. That made me think of Helene Weigel and her cart in Mother Courage (which Brecht wrote about the same time that Steinbeck wrote this) and to wish this had the clarity that that has.
The journey is full of setbacks and loss. Grampa dies not long after they start. Christopher Godwin makes him delightfully eccentric with his dreams of bathing in grapes. Lin Haley’s Granma fades away just before they cross the State border, a death Ma Joad hides.
In California, problems are even greater and more pointedly political with Casy, played by Natey Jones with an authority that matches his central place in the book's ideology. He has lost his religious beliefs, espousing instead a belief in the communal spirit of humanity, though his political activity, perhaps to fit US 1980s attitudes, seems less emphasised than in the original, though there is still a very clear picture of how the law can be misused and workers exploited.
Though this production doesn’t scale epic heights, it is still extremely moving, not least in its almost biblical final moments. Alex Eales's settings take us from sandstorm to flood, a splash about in a river to a settlement with a brightly lit hoedown. Guy Hoare’s chiaroscuro lighting adds to the drama, but what makes a long evening hold is the detailed ensemble work of the whole company.