‘Where are we going, George?” asks Lennie. “We’re goin’ to work on that farm,” George replies. Their dream is to find or make enough money to invest in a smallholding of their own, one day. But in Douglas Rintoul’s new production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men for the Newbury Watermill, you very quickly sense that their dream will never be fulfilled. There is a certain feeling of Waiting for Godot from the outset.

It’s not hard to see why the Watermill has chosen to stage the play at this time. It’s set in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Lennie and George have travelled to California from the southern states in search of work, as did many thousands of people in real life. They have been together through thick and thin, and are regarded with suspicion as a result — most men seeking work on farms were loners, outwardly at least. The sour-faced farm boss (Carl Patrick) regards them with distaste. “You can’t get away with nothing here,” he snarls.

The relationship between Lennie and George is crucial, and the Watermill has two winners in the roles. David Ganly’s Lennie is a great bear of a man, a softy who is easily moved to tears. But he is not endowed with much brain, and, like a child, he is unable to foresee the consequences of his actions. Crucially, he has no idea of his own strength. Thomas Padden’s George, on the other hand, is frustrated by Lennie’s dependency on him, but he is also fiercely protective – to the point of letting a violent temper run away with him. It is difficult to imagine how the ebb and flow of the relationship could be more sensitively portrayed.

There is just one woman on a farm full of men. She is the newly married wife of the boss’s son Curley (Tom Berish): “You see if she ain’t a tart,” remarks long-time farm hand Candy (Johnson Willis). As the immature Curley seethes with jealousy, Siobhan O’Kelly, playing his equally immature, flirty bride makes it plain she has no intention of hanging around: she is off to Hollywood, she says, “to be in the pictures”.

Steinbeck’s themes of poverty, loneliness, racial segregation and the hope of a better life tomorrow boil up in the pressure cooker atmosphere of a hot, claustrophobic, corrugated iron shed (designer Hayley Grindle). This is a riveting production of a still very relevant play.