Theatre review: The Grapes Of Wrath

Published on Wednesday 14 October 2009 18:57

THE GRAPES OF WRATH **** KING'S THEATRE, EDINBURGH

IN AN age as politically cynical as ours, it can be difficult to know what to make of a piece of literature as committed as John Steinbeck's great socialist masterpiece The Grapes Of Wrath, playing in Edinburgh this week in a new Chichester production of Frank Galati's stage version.

The 1939 novel tells of the Joad family, driven off their Oklahoma land by drought and foreclosure, and forced to join hundreds of thousands of other victims of the Depression on the road to California.

With the unrelenting eye of a great journalist, Steinbeck forces us to face the truth that well within living memory, clean-living white Americans – the group normally considered the luckiest on Earth – were literally starved to death, and dismissed as bums or criminals if they sought to organise any form of protest, within the economic and constitutional system in which they had placed their trust.

Faced with this almost unanswerable tirade against the inhumanity of savage capitalism, Jonathan Church's company, led by Christopher Timothy as Pa Joad, sometimes seem a shade bewildered themselves, struggling to connect individual characters to the larger picture. In Sorcha Cusack, though, Church has found a Ma Joad of towering status, a matriarch drenched in the instinctive human solidarity of a woman dedicated to nurturing life. Simon Higlett's design, dominated by 1930's advertising billboards, vividly embodies Steinbeck's fury that people could suffer such terrible deprivation in the wealthiest nation on earth.

And if the production never does quite enough to escape from its period, and overcome the resistance of those in the audience who seem more interested in the family's vintage truck than in their human tragedy, it still tells this great story with directness and passion, for anyone who wants to hear it.