Four weeks into a ten week tour, Selladoor Worldwide in association with The Marlowe Theatre’s production of Of Mice And Men, which is playing at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow until Saturday, puts storytelling firmly to the fore. With minimal movement, a sparse wooden set and a stripped back score, the performances by the 10-strong cast led by Richard Keightley as George and Matthew Wynn as Lennie are finely judged and quietly impressive.

The “best laid schemes” of whom being a patch of land populated by a few crops and a handful of livestock from which they hope to build a future; rather than ricocheting from pillar to post through the Dust Bowl at the mercy of ruthless employers like The Boss who rewards hard grafters with “pie” and punishes those who answer back or fail to live up to his high standards with the same cruel fate as Candy’s lame dog: “they bounce down the road on their can.”

Adapted for the stage from his own novella of the same name (both of which date to 1937, eight years after the Wall Street Crash which led to the Great Depression), the parallels of Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men with the global financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent decade of crippling austerity are obvious: the physical and emotional upheaval of which is captured in the opening sequence as streams of shadowy figures walk into the howling wind and blinding light of an insecure future.

Companionship and trust being the glue which binds the oddest of odd couples in George and Lennie together. That and their shared dream to “live off the fat of the land” which as we know from the Robert Burns poem To A Mouse from which the title takes its name “gang aft a-gley”. Not a phrase to describe director Guy Unsworth’s production which unlike the future of the migrant farm workers of the thirties and zero-hours contract workers of today is as solid as Lennie’s fist.

Peter Callaghan
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