A great American novel on a great British stage. The Grapes of Wrath is currently on at the National Theatre, and not for the first time: the same Frank Galati adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel was shown on the same Lyttleton stage in 1989. Now Carrie Cracknell directs a cast starring Tony winner Cherry Jones (Succession) and Harry Treadaway (The Chemistry of Death).
Jones and Treadaway are Ma and Tom, the matriarch of the Joad family and its bravest son. Their farmland having failed, the Joads must travel across America. They seek work and food. They find exploitation and hunger.
Their 2,000-mile journey is 600 pages in the novel and 170 minutes in this performance. Theatre cannot recreate the characterless vignette chapters Steinbeck called his “generals” – such as a scene of a dust turtle’s death – but compensates with atmosphere. Maimuna Menon leads a plangent, stirring bluegrass quartet, while the set revolves around the family’s beaten vehicle and their series of tents. A hazy backscreen makes the sky and onstage a pool of water suggests a river.
Density of drama drowns the first half. Ma keeps a death in the car to herself for the family’s sake. The preacher, when he finds out, is awed: “There’s a woman so great with love it scares me”. But her confession cannot have the same impact on the audience, as it directly follows two other losses in the family, and comes when Ma shares the stage with the band and a dozen other actors.
We know the characters by the second half, and feel with them. There is a gorgeously staged barn dance sequence, and Tom’s melancholy departure from his mother is devastating. The tricky last scene, where a mother who’s had a stillbirth breastfeeds a dying man, is played just too thickly, but nonetheless beautifully. It does the novel – a daunting work to adapt – justice.
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