Mail Online

This Steinbeck brings us down to (arid) earth with a bump

by Patrick Marmion

BIRMINGHAM Rep has been one of our brightest, most joyous and raucous theatres over the past couple of years; with feelgood shows such as The Play What I Wrote (and its big-name guest stars like Tom Hiddleston), the glorious Tom Jones musical What’s New Pussycat? and Spitting Image satire Idiots Assemble.

Now, though, it’s back down to the arid earth of dustbowl America — in this stage adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice And Men. Gird your loins.

Even the title tolls through time like a funeral bell, its biblical clang derived from Robert Burns’s ode to a mouse. But it also warns of the hard graft that awaits those who enter this tale of two drifters looking for farm employment during the Great Depression.

In a long opening scene we meet our heroes Lennie and George — the gentle giant with what today is diagnosed as learning difficulties, and his cousin, who tries to protect him. Once the two arrive at their place of labour, hard-bitten proverbs ping like chewin’ tobacco thwacking into a tin spittoon. ‘The only thing a guy’s got is where he’s come from, and where he’s going,’ intones an old-timer with more fingers than teeth.

The old man’s no less ancient dog — played by a ropy puppet with a crocked spine and juddering walk — is the soul of the story, and is therefore led out to be shot and buried. And this after four newborn puppies have been drowned because their mother couldn’t feed the whole litter. While a pretty young woman on the all-male ranch is seen as a dangerous temptress, likely to land our heroes in jail. Amid all the mortification of the soul, it can be hard to remember that Steinbeck’s play is also entertainment — albeit one intended to stiffen our endurance and command our compassion. And Iqbal Khan’s gloomy revival is no less keen to remind us of its solemn purpose: casting an actor with learning difficulties as Lennie, as well as two other disabled actors as the oldtimer and ostracised black man whose bodies have been ravaged by their work. The idea is that actors with disabilities have special insights into their roles. This may be so, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better equipped to share those insights. Instead, it makes for a very literal understanding of Steinbeck’s parable. William Young makes a sweetly ponderous Lennie; Lee Ravitz is all but inaudible as the mumbling old-timer Candy; and Reece Pantry is wry but resilient as labourer Crooks.

More complex is Tom McCall as Lennie’s protective but exasperated cousin George. He comes across as a smart and unpredictable lost soul, palpably scared of what’s coming at him in his travels (even though his CV shows no evidence of having been a displaced farm labourer from the American Midwest). Ciaran Bagnall’s set also manages a degree of artfulness, with repurposed planks arranged to suggest railway sleepers, vanishing horizons and barns in end-state dilapidation.

It’s an undoubtedly solid production, leavened with the odd Woody Guthrie-ish folk tune. But the solidity of Steinbeck’s remorseless script is also its problem.

Because the author died in 1968, it is still under copyright and seemingly immutable. It cries out for the kind of reset we have come to expect from Khan’s more dynamic productions such as East Is East and Tartuffe (also recently staged here).

But for that, I fear, we must wait another 15 years.

It’s Friday! | Theatre

en-gb

2023-03-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://mailonline.pressreader.com/article/282260964710688

dmg media (UK)