MEN on the move, desperately looking for work in straitened times and competing with other men to do so, is the story of today as much as it was in Steinbeck’s novella in the Great American Depression.

Of Mice And Men keeps coming round, but you will not have seen it or heard it done like this before, as Mark Rosenblatt announces his arrival as the Playhouse’s new associate director with a risk-taking production that introduces a score as potent in its impact as Brokeback Mountain’s soundtrack.

It is not a musical but the music of Avant-Americana composer, singer and musician Heather Christian opens and haunts the play, establishing a sense of the vast and dry landscape, its animal and bird life too.

The men on stage provide harmonies and handclaps and stamping, and the master stroke is to have Christian also play the sole female role: the never-named Curley’s Wife, desperately lonely, Hollywood-fixated and unloved by her trigger-happy, jumped- up husband (John Trindle).

Christian’s extraordinary singing, often at the piano, only emphasises the sense of a woman alone, and such is its potency, the production could have accommodated even more music.

Max Jones’s set, complemented by Tim Mitchell’s lighting, should win a design with its combination of the endless skies, harsh Californian dustbowl plains, ripened crops, huge barn doors and tough working and sleeping conditions for the ranch’s hired hands.

The grey tractor contrasts with the golden American dream of two migrant workers, friends and survivors, smart George (Henry Pettigrew) and the big, dangerously strong and simple Lennie (Dyfrig Morris), as they save nickels to buy a small farm.

Morris’s performance is utterly devastating in a cast where Kelsey Brookfield’s Crooks excels too, and the only false note in Rosenblatt’s impressive debut is his Donnie Darko rabbit moment: an unnecessary earful.

 

Of Mice And Men, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until March 29. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk