John Steinbeck Archives - charleshutchpress

*Ryan Adams: “Remains a performer you need to watch, never sure how he’ll react or respond”*

IT CAN be hard to read someone in the dark, an audience or a performer for that matter.

After 30 songs (more if you throw in the skits) and more than three hours, the standing ovation was a little unexpected. North Carolina-born Adams obviously has a real affection for York – this was his fourth show here since 2007 – and he talked of moving him and his cats to the UK.

“I love you so very much, York. You have always treated me like one of your own. I love you all so very much,” he wrote later in his Instagram account. It was clear we felt the same way.

With more than 1.2 million followers, he remains a big deal and can certainly command an audience. Adams tours with side lamps, piano and acoustic guitars for company (so presumably lots of space in the large tour bus outside). The same set-up as his April 2023 concert in the same venue, this time ostensibly marking the 20th anniversary of 2004’s Love Is Hell and tenth anniversary of 2014’s self-titled album.

A sufferer from Meniere’s disease, he is particularly susceptible to bright lights, and a red LED light led to an early dressing down for one unthinking audience member. From there it was a mostly digital-free affair, which allowed us to focus on the songs and the voice in the gloaming.

Adams is an expressive, wonderful singer, and a very capable guitarist. With this artist though, the music is not the only show in town. As he matures (50 next year, God willing), he remains a performer you need to watch, never sure how he’ll react or respond.

He can win any shootout with a heckler, but this spikiness is leavened by his quick sense of humour. His (presumably) impromptu songs about the Spin Doctors and a significant part of Lenny Kravitz were hilarious.

Adams is obviously watching the audience closely too, ruefully noting an attractive blue dress heading for the exit. Most of his songs pick up on that theme in some shape or form, and in that sense he is a natural heir to the cry-in-your-beer honky-tonk greats such as Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams.

Carolina Rain (the highlight from 2005’s 29 album) is a southern gothic short story in song form and Adams inhabited every word before the long guitar outro. It felt more vital, in fact, than his take on Williams’s I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry that came immediately before.

“This music is not healthy for anyone,” he said early in the second set, and while in large doses that may be true, there were many vital, gorgeous moments. His take on Bob Dylan’s Love Sick ached with lyricism, and his Bobnesss’ influence was also writ large on To Be Young – one of the tunes that lit up the second half of the second half.

Adams’s act is a bizarre mix of assertive confrontation and exaggerated solicitousness that sees him stop songs to say “Bless you” to a sneeze.

“Like trying to ride a really elegant bull” was Adams’s typically leftfield way of describing playing in our city. While that line (rightly) fell flat, he does have an unusual view of the world – and it was clear he was among friends.

That said, his diatribes about his divorce and his strident dismissal of the ‘lech’ tag made for more uncomfortable listening. It will probably always be too soon to joke about.

The second set dragged along rather, the chair for John Steinbeck’s ghost remained resolutely empty behind him, and not quite everyone made it to the final curtain. Come Pick Us Up, his final number, he may not have, but as the ovation faded, we left the richer for watching a unique talent share his very soul with us.

Review by Paul Rhodes

*William Young’s Lennie in Of Mice And Men at Leeds Playhouse*. *All pictures: Kris Askey*

LIKE a hamster wheel, Of Mice And Men keeps coming round, chiming uncomfortably with our times once more with its themes of economic migration, racism, prejudice, misogyny and exclusion.

Last staged at the Playhouse in March 2014 in Mark Rosenblatt’s risk-taking production with a score by Avant-Americana composer, singer and musician Heather Christian, it returns in a powerhouse Leeds Playhouse collaboration with the Second City’s Birmingham Rep and London producers Fiery Angel.

What’s more, John Steinbeck’s novella of the Great American Depression, adapted into a three-act play by the American writer himself in 1937, is in the hands of last summer’s Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony director Iqbal Khan, Birmingham Rep’s associate director.

He parades flair for theatre on a big scale to match the vast and dry American plains – and yet he achieves intimacy too, even in the expanses of the Playhouse’s Quarry Theatre, as the play’s first act charts the bond between two migrant workers, smart George (Tom McCall) and the towering, sweet-natured but dangerously strong Lennie (William Young).

They are men on the move, out of necessity, escaping Lennie’s latest unfortunate incident, desperately looking for work in straitened times and competing with other men to do so. Same story, more than 80 years later, only now men must travel farther against a tide of Brexit bellicosity and Stop The Boats posturing.

Yet, as the itinerant workers establish over a can of beans and a wood fire under the stars, this is a story of durable friendship and survival, one rooted in the hope, always on the horizon, of saving enough nickels to buy their own small farmstead with chickens and rabbits.

*Of Mice And Men cast members, from left: Reece Pantry (Crooks), Maddy Hill (Curley’s Wife), William Young (Lennie), Tom McCall (George), Riad Richie (Curley) and Lee Ravitz (Candy)*

This is the American Dream at its most primal, with a shared longing for a place they can call home for the protective, cautious, steely George and the innocent Lennie.

The problem is: fantasy always meets the reality of prejudices, in the tinderbox of the bunkhouse and barns of Curley’s Californian ranch, as hired hands George and Lennie start their latest shift of hard graft and hard bunks.

Curley (Riad Richie) is trigger happy, jumped up, restless over what his neglected, desperately lonely, unloved, Hollywood-fixated new wife – the never named Curley’s Wife (Maddy Hill) – may or may not be doing, in need of company and connection amid so much machismo. He has his eye on her roving eye. Trouble this way comes, tragedy too.

Under Khan’s direction (with resident director Laura Ryder overseeing the tour), the language is muscular, confrontational, enflamed too, carrying the greatest weight, for all the visual impact of Ciaran Bagnall’s set and dustbowl lighting, with its steel frameworks for bunkbeds and huge barns beneath wooden beams that lower as the play progresses to give a sense of compression.

Curley’s Wife is not alone in being subjected to exclusion. So too is Crooks (Reece Pantry), the blacksmith segregated on account of being black, with only his books for company.

McCall, Young, Hill and Pantry go to the heart in devastating, terrific central performances, alongside Lee Ravitz’s Candy, always keen to please as the ultimate team player.

As in 2014, music plays its part with dustbowl country songs on guitar and a dramatic soundscape by Elizabeth Purnell. Puppeteer Jake Benson’s work with Candy’s stinking old dog adds poignancy to that ruthless scene and Kay Wilton’s period costume designs are spot on, especially for Curley’s Wife.

Of Mice And Men will return, you know it will, because times move on but the problems do not. Steinbeck’s eloquence shames us and hope is crushed again, like a puppy in Lennie’s hands.

Box office: 0113 213 7700 or leedsplayhouse.org.uk

Tag: John Steinbeck

REVIEW: Paul Rhodes’s verdict on Ryan Adams, York Barbican, September 20

REVIEW: Leeds Playhouse, Birmingham Rep and Fiery Angel in Of Mice And Men, Leeds Playhouse, until May 27 ****