Crescent Theatre Blog

As I write, a second full house of school children are enjoying ‘Of Mice and Men’ in the Ron Barber Studio here at The Crescent Theatre. This is our second experience of trying out schools’ matinees this season and as with ‘Journey’s End’ in November, the day has proved extremely popular.

It’s often not easy for people to give up a day of their valuable holiday allowance to come in and perform for school parties, but when they do they have a great time. On behalf of all at the theatre I’d like to extend thanks to everyone who has come in today to act, stage manage, run sound or lighting, sell coffee and prepare lunch for the team.

As you may know already, the theatre’s incredible production of Of Mice and Men opens tonight. The theatre website’s show page has now been updated with some official pics from the Dress Rehearsal, and you can read a little about what actor Phil Leonard makes of his imminent debut at the AboutMyArea website here.

The best laid plans often go right too! Well, at least Liz Plumpton’s plans for Of Mice and Men certainly seemed to be coming together very well at last night’s dress rehearsal. The production opens tomorrow (Friday, 23 January), runs for two weeks and is a show not to be missed. My congratulations to cast and crew for pulling together a great production and best wishes for a successful run – you deserve it!

‘The future is called “perhaps” which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.’ (Tennessee Williams)

Of Mice and Men is set in America during the economically depressed 1930s. It was a time of uncertainty about finance and investments, of instability in the employment market and of considerable hardship for many ordinary people (sound familiar yet?). The itinerant farm workers that Steinbeck writes about were forced to leave their homes and move from job to job and place to place in search of their ‘fifty bucks at the end of the month’.

As the Crescent prepares to mount a production of Of Mice and Men at a time of ever-deepening gloom about the economy, I’m wondering whether we are any more or less scared of our modern-day “perhapses” and whether we are any better equipped than Steinbeck’s characters to cope with them.

Many of the characters in the play have dreams for their futures; from movie stardom to just having a small farm of their own where nobody is able to ‘can’ them; in other words control of their own destiny. What would our attitude be to their dreams today? At work it seems that I am being asked to set targets/goals for myself or others on an almost daily basis. Our target-driven society would have been a mystery to Steinbeck’s characters – ‘What’s his average grain-bags-per-hour bucking rate?’ doesn’t quite ring true!

A modern-day ‘life coach’ might advise the characters to visualise themselves succeeding and achieving their dreams. Or perhaps they ought to set themselves a series of SMART targets to help them gradually move towards the future that they want? Spending time imagining or ‘visualising’ their dreams doesn’t seem to do the characters in OMAM much good. Indeed it only increases the pathos when their dreams are shattered one by one with varying degrees of brutality. The most content characters in the story (Slim, Whit, Carlson) are arguably those don’t aspire for more than what they’ve got.

Perhaps it is not the future itself that is scary but the act of daring to have a concrete dream for it. Wanting something (however simple) so badly can make you vulnerable to the pain of disappointment, as John Steinbeck’s choice of title suggests. The line is from Robert Burns’ poem To A Mouse, On Turning Up Her Nest With A Plough;

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men

Gang aft agley, (Often go awry)

An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!”

So is it best to settle for your lot in life and take the future as it finds you, rather than try to shape it? Not a terribly motivating message to take from a story that I love dearly. I read an interview with Sigourney Weaver recently where she said “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘vulnerable’ until you have children.” Perhaps our dreams for our futures, like those of George, Lennie et al, are a little like children. We nurture our dreams and worry about them not working out. But ultimately, fear of losing them (dreams or children!) doesn’t usually stop us having them in the first place. We share the biological urge to reproduce with mice but perhaps it is the desire to dream that makes us men.

I realised the true power of ‘Of Mice and Men’ the first time I taught the novel to a (usually) disinterested class of Year 11 students. I got my first hint that something was up when the previously monosyllabic, ‘tough guy’ of the class arrived on time (!) for my lesson, took his coat off without being asked, sat down and  asked, with affected nonchalance, ‘We reading that book again today Miss?’. Kids began to initiate discussions about the story and ask interesting questions. It was a revelation. Then there was the long silence that settled over the group after we had read the section where George shoots Lennie, as several streetwise 15 year olds discreetly wiped away a tear.

It’s a special story. It’s also a pretty simple one and at its heart is the relationship between George and Lennie. It’s a love story; not in any sexual sense but in the sense that love is the only real explanation for their actions in the story.

‘If we had any ketchup you could have it. And if I had a hundred bucks I’d buy you a bunch of flowers.’ (George)

George would dearly like to create a home for Lennie where he could be safe and where George wouldn’t constantly be watching out for him. There is genuine affection and companionship between them and that provides an antidote to the loneliness that afflicts so many of the other characters in the play. There are constant references to how unusual it is for two guys to travel around together for work. Their unconventional friendship provokes a variety of responses from the other characters; suspicion (Curley and the Boss), envy (Crooks and to an extent Candy), acceptance (Slim) and indifference (Carlson and Whit).

There are clear parallels between Lennie and George and Candy and his ‘ole dog’. Nobody else can really understand what is ‘in’ these two relationships for Candy or George. Rather than familiarity breeding contempt, in both cases it is the longevity of the relationships and the being ‘used to’ the smelly old dog or the simple giant, that breeds deep affection and a desire to protect.

‘I kinda got used to him and then I couldn’t get rid of being used to him’ (George) ‘I had him from a pup…I wouldn’t want him to suffer.’ (Candy, as Carlson is trying to persuade him to shoot his dog)

Just as Candy loses his only real companion, his dog, George loses Lennie when he must kill him to protect him from a worse fate at the hands of a lynch mob. Ultimately, George cannot keep Lennie safe from himself.

Now that the show is cast (including the dog!), the actors and I are are beginning to explore these relationships. Now matter how many times I hear, read or watch this story, it never fails to move me. I think what makes it so brilliant (and so beloved of adolescents in English classrooms everywhere) is that you can strip away the context of the American Dream and the Great Depression and all that ‘stuff’ and there is just a cracking human interest story underneath.