Of Mice and Men (2015)

Like most of us I first encountered John Steinbeck at school. In one year I was also introduced to George Orwell, Arthur Miller and J.D Salinger and it set me on a path.

Steinbeck’s tough and deeply humane tale hooked me hard when I was 14 even though I was probably too young to appreciate the central mechanism of the novel. I had very few plans, they weren’t best laid and none of them had gone awry. At the time I was compelled by the deep friendship of Lennie and George, two men almost randomly thrown together yet so bound to each other that the whole universe of the story is destroyed the moment they are pulled apart. I remember sitting on my own bunk bed after finishing the book and it was if I was holding something spent of its words, as if I could open it again and it would be just blank pages. As much as I was drawn by this extraordinary incongruous friendship I was also deeply moved by Steinbeck’s respectful and close portraiture of loneliness. I knew what loneliness was by then, sat on that bunk bed in a boarding school, my family in another country altogether I had just enough insight to appreciate Steinbeck’s lean eloquent and respectful genius.

Revisiting this dearly loved childhood text now I’m struck by its adultness. I see Steinbeck’s close simple observation open up universes of human need. It is true: The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, as we get older we feel this in deeper and darker ways. We reach for our dreams in a way that exposes us to the cruelty of only realising them briefly. It’s a cruel story but it makes you cling ever more tightly to the consolation of your dreams.

When Slim says to George that it seems to him “maybe everybody in the whole damn world is scared of each other” I wonder how far we have evolved from the depression, when economic hardship made us fearful and untrusting of migrants, of how ‘tightening our belts’ impacts those most exposed to hardship and how economic austerity pulls us away from kindness and toward something less admirable.

Again Slim has the words for it: “I’ve seen ‘em get mean”.

I have been overwhelmed by the generosity of spirit that Sport for Jove injects into theatre and humbled by the depth of investment the actors have have made in this production and I'm very fortunate to have revisited a work that put me on the path I find myself on still.