John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. It is one of the great American novels, a powerful historical documentation and an angry condemnation of the Great Depression in the 1930’s.
It became an instant best seller and won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1962 the Nobel Prize committee cited the novel as “a great work” and one of the main reasons for awarding Steinbeck their Prize for Literature.
The movie in 1940, starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine, won John Ford an Academy Award for Best Direction. Photographer Gregg Toland took his inspiration from photo journalist Dorothea Lange’s famous collection of photos. The harsh and stark black and white film, with its documentary realism, is a difficult act to follow.
The novel was adapted for the stage by Fank Galati for Chicago’s Steppenwolf company. The production came to the National Theatre in 1989 and it is that version which is being revived now in a production by Carrie Cracknell.
The Dust Bowl in Oklahoma was the worst man-made disaster in US history. The grasslands became a barren, unfarmable landscape which led to mass migration.
Around 15 million people were unemployed in the US. Steinbeck concentrates on one dispossessed farming family, the Joad’s, and their 2,000-mile car journey from Oklahoma to California in the search of work and a better life.
The image which dominates the production is the dilapidated old car, which is constantly moved around the stage and is as potent a symbol as the cart in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.
The Grapes of Wrath is a saga of poverty, homelessness, oppression, exploitation and death. Steinbeck’s final scene, with the rain beating down, is a poignant and an unforgettable climax: a young woman, having just given birth to a still¬born child, gives suck to a man dying of starvation.
The actors are essentially an ensemble. Frank Galati’s adaptation is a series of fragmented episodes which never allow stalwart Ma Joad and her ex-convict son, Tom, to take full command of the stage and have the impact they have in the film.
If Natey Jones stands out, it is because he is playing the charismatic Jim Casey, the travelling ex-preacher, the novel’s moral spokesman, and he has the biggest personality of them all.
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