By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN?: Tuesday 30 July 2024, opens 31 July and booking until 14 September 2024 RUNTIME: 170 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

Sharing the milk of human kindness is very much the essence of this theatrical adaptation of John Steinbeck’s beloved 1939 novel.

• Read on for reasons including how this production is exquisitely performed and executed with a visual flair that makes for a feast for the eyes as well as the mind

It’s the story of the Joad family of farmers forced to flee their Oklahoma Dust Bowl home by drought and travel thousands of miles to California in search of hope and jobs.

We last saw Cherry Jones in The Glass Menagerie at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2017 but she may be more familiar from TV’s Succession and here she stars as Ma Joad in a performance brimming with dignity and seriousness which never slips into grandstanding.

Ma Joad’s philiosophy – ‘We ain’ gonna die out. People is goin’ on – changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on’ – is very much the human strength in adversity fibre you should expect here.

You join us as son Tom Joad, Harry Treadaway capable of hot-headedness when faced with injustice, encounters a former preacher as he returns to his family home and the pair join the migration to California.

Director Carrie Cracknell (The Deep Blue Sea, National Theatre) sets the scene beautifully with the use of haze to recreate the Dust Bowl landscape that no longer offers hope for a farming future.

Olivier Award nominee Maimuna Memon (Manic Street Creature, Southwark Playhouse) leads an onstage quartet of musicians playing her original songs as we join the Joad family on their journey West.

The migration is hard and family members leave and die along the way and Tom is influenced by the thinking of the former preacher Jim Casy, a believable Natey Jones, who has turned away from religion but believes that all men share 1 soul.

The migrants receive warning along the way that California may not be the promised land they are hoping for and what they encounter is a police force very much in league with the employers promising work but exploiting those they offer it to.

The Grapes Of Wrath is an often studied novel renowned as a classic and Frank Galati’s adaptation offers occasional laughs and dancing on its journey investigating a society bedevilled by its obsession with ‘reds’ looking to cause havoc.

Its brutality and injustice is highlighted well here in a production which is exquisitely performed and executed with a visual flair that makes for a feast for the eyes as well as the mind.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy National Theatre Tickets
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