Showing @ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 17 Mar
The American Dream has brusquely faded over the years. At the time Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men (1937), it struck a balance between the tangible success of owning land and the benevolent hunt for social equality. As the decades passed, we financialised The Dream and packaged it as a sexier feat to render it all the more elusive. 75 years on, we’re still after it, but John Dove’s production reminds us that the themes underneath are the ones which will remain vibrant and noteworthy.
William Ash and Steve Jackson give impressively charged yet tender performances as the now iconic George and Lennie. Travelling across America during the Great Depression, they settle in California to work on a ranch, lightly bronzed with distinct wooden surfaces and summery dusk lighting by designers Colin Richmond and Jeanine Davies.
The towering sets which range from bunk-bed living quarters to hay filled barns loom over the action, echoing the arguments between George and Curley while bestowing a frosty sense of perspective to the scale of the protagonists’ dreams. The size reflects Steinbeck’s text: soaring metaphors, epic quests and seemingly unreachable ideals. His themes are weaving yet pervasive, his characters complex yet ordinary, his message profound yet candid – and Dove respects this with fairly simple and unsigned direction.
There’s just something missing from this production. Perhaps it’s a longing for Steinbeck’s original poetic literacy, his capacity for sentimental storytelling which is emotional but never mawkish. It might be that Peter Kelly and Garry Collins’s performances as Candy and Curley miss the subtle, more believable characterisation provided by Ray Walston and Casey Siemaszko in Gary Sinise’s 1992 film adaptation. There isn’t a balanced enough exploration of John Macauley’s Crooks and some deliveries just feel clumsy, caricatured and thorny. This isn’t to say Dove’s play is weak; he has translated Steinbeck for the stage quite efficiently, it just lacks the energy and authority needed to support such a superior tale.