Theatre review: The Grapes of Wrath

It turns out The Grapes of Wrath isn't actually about haemorrhoids - John Steinbeck's Great American Novel^TM, in an adaptation by Frank Galati which Carrie Cracknell revives at the Lyttelton, wouldn't be dealing with anything as light-hearted as that. Instead this is a definitive story of the Great Depression, and the production opens with a dramatic, balletic series of scenes (movement direction by Ira Mandela Siobhan) showing the wind ravaging the people and the overfarmed land, creating the famous Dust Bowl which left farming families across America without an income. We follow the extended Joad family, led by the endlessly kind Ma (Cherry Jones) and terminally passive Pa (Greg Hicks,) as they drive to California where, according to flyers that have been distributed across the country, there are many good jobs to be found picking peaches and grapes.

Theatre review: The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams' most overtly autobiographical play is probably my favourite, which is just as well as it's also the one I've seen most often - John Tiffany's production of The Glass Menagerie is my fourth, and comes to London after acclaimed runs in New York and Edinburgh. Tom (Michael Esper) is the narrator, unreliable by his own admission, of a memory from his youth in St Louis living with his mother and sister, his father having long sonce absconded. His sister Laura (Kate O'Flynn) has a slight limp, and in her teens was ill with pleurisy for a long time, and both have been magnified in her mind - she became shy to the point that it's now a crippling mental illness. At the play's opening, their mother Amanda (Cherry Jones) discovers that Laura has been lying about going to a typing course for the last few weeks - she had a panic attack after a couple of days and dropped out.