As an impressively-realistic rainstorm lashed the characters on stage, the heavens hammered down on the theatre roof.

It seems there is nothing director Jonathan Church can't command in this huge-scale retelling of John Steinbeck's epic novel.

Church conjures brilliantly the optimism with which the Joads, a family of impoverished Oklahoman sharecroppers, trek a couple of thousand of miles across America in the hope of sharing in California's vaunted milk and honey.

He also conjures brilliantly the crushing disappointment of the reality – ghastly brutality, exploitation and starvation.

And yet, their number dwindling at every turn, the Joads doggedly keep going, battered but undefeated, as the play's final gesture – perhaps slightly too coyly done – movingly shows.

The fates throw everything at the Joads which makes it fairly grim viewing, unleavened by anything much in particular besides a brief bit of cowboy dancing.

And the first half is certainly too long – though you could argue the whole things builds all the more powerfully for its slow start.

But the real merit is in the audacity of its staging.

Just occasionally you expect the truck in which they travel to fly off Chitty-like over the heads of the audience; but it's key to the journey at the heart of it all, and it's effective in that respect.

And then the heavens open, both on stage and off. The on-stage river floods; a baby is stillborn; all of life – and death – is here in Church's epic staging, to which the actors respond admirably.

Oliver Cotton, Sorcha Cusack, Damian O'Hare and Christopher Timothy are the names, but none of them stands out – which is exactly as it should be. The point is they are all in it together through thick and thin and even thinner.

The play runs until August 28

Phil Hewitt