We can make it. We just have to make an effort, work, be diligent and not spare ourselves. Then nothing will be able to stop us, neither poverty nor natural disasters, and certainly not other people. This is what the Joad family believes at the beginning of John Steinbeck’s epoch-defining American epic – as, holding on firmly to this belief, they set off for the golden West, where oranges grow everywhere and there is work for everybody. Or so they’ve heard. In reality things look very different. Not everyone can make it – you need a bit of luck. And money and relations and at times a good dose of wiliness. Their firm belief in the American dream starts to gradually disintegrate, becomes full of holes and ultimately shatters. Unlike in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, in which an individual’s success becomes the measure of their worth, and which will be presented in January 2020 in the Schiffbau Halle, the characters in Nobel prize-winner Steinbeck’s novel cannot take their fate into their own hands, because their hands are tied. In the new Schauspielhaus Zürich’s very first production, Christopher Rüping will direct Steinbeck’s story for the Pfauen, between drought and deluge, paradise and hell. “Go West, go West / Where there’s fruit in every place / A smile on every face.”
