1998

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

adapted by Rob Croser

Independent Theatre

Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Independent Theatre has had a continuing relationship with the works of John Steinbeck for a while now. Several years ago the company presented Frank Galati’s stage adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath and now, with the benediction of Elaine Steinbeck, the writer’s widow, director Rob Croser has taken East of Eden and staged it in the Playhouse.

It is a hugely ambitious project and one dear to Mrs Steinbeck. Written just after she married the great social realist writer in 1950, East of Eden turned out to be his last epic novel. And it was one in which Steinbeck delved his own life for part of its subject matter. “It is two books,” he told his publisher soon after it was finished, “the story of my country and the story of me.”

In fact it is really neither. Certainly he based the idealised Samuel Hamilton on his maternal grandfather, and there is some transformed autobiographical detail in the main narrative. But the doom-ridden tale of three generations of luckless Trasks – starting with Cyrus, the father of Adam and his brother Charles, and then the destinies of twins Cal and Aron – reads more like a re-run of the darkest lines of Genesis and focuses on the problematic implications of the tale of Cain and Abel. It also asks whether, in subsequent human history, the stern God who made them is ever going to give them a parachute clause from that pesky old concept of original sin.

In bringing so much of such a large, sprawling tome to the stage Rod Croser faces a difficult task. When Elia Kazan made his film version in 1955 he started half way through. When it was remade more recently it was turned into a mini-series. Independent’s East of Eden, with a running time of three hours twenty, is not just bigger than Salinas, it is bigger than Texas. And it is precisely Croser’s reverence for the text that makes it harder for him to make his production effectively dramatic.

When John Steinbeck wrote his novel he was unconcerned with the imperatives of staging. He could paint extensive word pictures of the Californian landscape, he could philosophise and digress. In fact, many readers find his novel only a mixed success compared to the heroic focus of his early work. At any rate it all spells difficulty for theatrical translation. How do you get through all this exposition ? How well does the dialogue sound on stage ? How complete are characters like Lee and Hamilton, apart from the ideas and philosophies they embody ?

Rob Croser has gone in, boots and all. His East of Eden is big. Big stage, big speeches, big story, big gestures and big explanations. It is a wordy production of a wordy novel. There is no narrator to compress and summarise events. We are shown and we are told, and despite the tremendous commitment of the director and the company to sustain such a large work ultimately the effect is  prosaic and undramatic.

The set, designed by Croser and David Roach, uses a steeply raked central catwalk, flanked on each side with a series of levels for kitchen and bedroom scenes. Two imposing doors are lowered at the back of the stage to suggest a barn-like environment, a velvet curtain lowers periodically for the bordello scenes and two large triangular segments backlit with sky blue, are used to create a sense of Californian vista. Cascading around us are the works of Aaron Copland, including excerpts from Appalachian Spring. It ought to fit well. But instead it overwhelms the production.  Like much film music from the 1940s and 50s it sounds busy and excessive to our minimalist ears.

The performances while mixed are without exception, valiant. Andrew Dudek is irascible as Charles Trask and has a saleman’s charm as Will Hamilton. Luke Dean and Kerry Cox work well as Aron and Abra, providing a necessary orthodoxy for Tom Collison’s conflicted portrait of Cal. His is a well-considered performance, balancing the open-heartedness of the character against the impulse for spite. Kathryn Dean has a difficult task with the role of Cathy, an unknowable woman almost without a psychology. She is more like a Vice figure, part of Steinbeck’s symbolic algebra rather than a rounded character.

Both Lee and Hamilton, the Chinese sage and the Irish patriarch, are stereotypes – Steinbeck himself is quick to say so. As Lee, Huong Nguyen brings warmth and consistency to a difficult part, which becomes formidably verbose in the final scenes. According to the novelist’s own description, Bruce Keir is Samuel Hamilton to the life, and despite inexperience, Keir navigates the sentimentality of the writing for a memorable performance.

And, again, David Roach serves the company well with his steady rendering of Adam Trask, an unlikeable man who is buffeted by life and desperately slow to learn despite the endless devotion of those around him. Only finally, and laboriously, does he learn the lesson of “timshel.” Not “thou shalt” but “thou mayest”-  Steinbeck’s heavy-handed circuit breaker to those endless repetitions of blood determinism.

“Family Ties” The Adelaide Review, No.178, July, 1998, p.30.