Theatre Review: The Grapes Of Wrath, King's Theatre, Edinburgh

Published on Friday 9 October 2009 17:15

The financial crisis brings a new urgency to a revival of depression era classic The Grapes Of Wrath, its director and cast tell Susan Mansfield

RUTHLESS bankers, ecological blunders, unemployment, repossessions. It's not hard to make The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck's depression-era epic, resonate with contemporary audiences.

With the country suffering from what could be the biggest recession since the 1930s, director Jonathan Church felt the time was right to revive Frank Galati's adaptation, which has not been seen in Britain since 1988.

"With many eyes turning to America, it felt like the right moment to look at it again," says Church, who directed Matthew Kelly in an acclaimed version of Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men in 2003.

"Gordon Brown said we'd got rid of the boom and bust cycle, and suddenly we're back into a bust with banks collapsing and a lot of people losing their jobs. There's this notion that we're not all protected, that we need to provide for our families, find a job, find somewhere to live, things that we used to take for granted. That's what this play is about."

Steinbeck's 1939 classic follows the Joads, dispossessed tenant farmers from Oklahoma who head for California in their battered old truck on the promise of a prosperous new life. But thousands of other families are on the same road, and the promise isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The 1930s "dust bowl" on the Southern Plains has since been called "one of the three worst ecological blunders in history". Greedy landowners ploughing up natural grasses to plant cash crops turned a natural drought into a catastrophe. Thousands of sharecroppers, their farms repossessed and livelihoods destroyed, followed promises of work to California, only to live in squatter camps and compete for sparse casual labour.

Church says the acclaimed adaptation, done for Chicago's Steppenwolf company in the 1980s, demands an epic scale. His version, made in Chichester and co-produced by English Touring Theatre, has a cast of 20. Simon Higlett's ambitious set includes a truck, a downpour and waist-deep water to represent the Colorado River.

But it's equally important that the endurance and dignity of the characters shine through. The stellar ensemble is led by Christopher Timothy (Doctors, All Creatures Great And Small) and Sorcha Cusack (Casualty, Coronation Street) as Pa and Ma Joad, with Oliver Cotton as the preacher Casy, and Damian O'Hare as son Tom, the part played by an Oscar-winning Henry Fonda in the 1940 film.

As the family's plight worsens, the men's bravado gives way to the stoic endurance of the women, led by a quietly indomitable Cusack. Timothy says this should come as no surprise. "I come from North Wales, I've been to Scotland and Ireland, and no matter how butch and tough the men are, it's well-nigh a matriarchal society. Those countries are full of strong, rugby-playing, kick-you-in-the-face men, but women are the backbone."

Unemployment, he says, is particularly tough on men. "We're the breadwinners, that's really still the case, isn't it? Certainly it's the image a lot of society still promotes. If a man is not able to provide, it makes him feel impotent. I know, I feel impotent if I'm not working as an actor."

It was his need to provide for his five growing children which drove him, as a virtual unknown, to push producers for the role of vet James Herriot in All Creatures Great And Small, launched by the BBC in 1978.

"They were looking at me for other parts, but I said to (producer] Bill Sellars, 'It's James Herriot or nothing'. It was an insane thing to say, but I was unemployed and I had mouths to feed.

"They had cast everybody except for James Herriot, and they wanted to cast a 'name'. They were all sitting round a table, and apparently after a while one of the directors said: 'Why don't we just give it to Christopher Timothy and make him a name?' And there was a slight pause, and Bill Sellars said: 'Yeah, all right then.' I'm ever so glad they did."

The show ran for seven series, finally finishing in 1990, and Timothy became so closely associated with the role that he has struggled to work in television since. "I arrived at my agent's one day and he was screaming down the phone: 'He's a bloody actor, not a vet!' I wanted to play villains and people would say 'You can't do that, you're too nice a guy'." He grins. "Actually, I'm a shit, but no-one's given me the chance to show it – at least not publicly."

He admits he is being stretched by the part of Pa Joad after being persuaded by Church to accept the role, and is increasingly convinced of the relevance of the story.

"Last night a man in the audience gave us a standing ovation. He was an American whose grandfather was driven off his 300-acre farm in 1935 in return for $1. How relevant is that? What about the immigrants in this country who are being ripped off picking fruit now? Nothing changes, does it?"

Steinbeck's novel, which won a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize for Literature, was unashamedly polemical. He had reported on the dispossessed sharecroppers as a journalist and, like other artists, including folk singer Woody Guthrie and photographer Dorothea Lange, was determined to highlight their plight while much of the United States ignored them. The book, with its emphasis on the triumph of the human spirit, the dignity of the working man and the fight for fair wages, promotes an idealistic form of socialism.

Some hold the view that politics sullies a great work of art, but Jonathan Church disagrees: "I'd say most great art is political, particularly in literature and theatre. Any viewpoint is political, and you have to have a strong viewpoint to create a work of great art."

The Grapes Of Wrath, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, Tuesday to Saturday