What have we got to complain about? That was the feeling I got from the audience at Chichester, a prosperous city but not one that has avoided the recession, as it watched Frank Galati’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s novel. Seventy-odd years ago thousands of Midwesterners, mainly tenant farmers, trekked to California to escape the dustbowl that had ruined their crops and left them at the mercy of bankers.

Jonathan Church’s revival certainly makes you feel the poverty, the despair but also the defiance and resilience.

At the centre is the Joad family: dying grandpa and doomed grandma; Christopher Timothy’s doughty Pa and Sorcha Cusack’s Ma, who is the voice of optimism through trials galore; and, packed into a disintegrating jalopy, assorted children and relatives. Prime among them is son Tom, who has killed a man in a fight but is now on parole from prison. Damian O’Hare, who plays him, remains cleaner than anyone should after 2,000 miles of dirt, dust and desert, but he has much of the vigour and charisma that Gary Sinise brought to Galati’s production at the Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago, in the 1980s.

Maybe I’m idealising the past, but that was altogether a more intense experience. It seems a bit trivial to say that Church’s bold, ambitious production is a bit of an ordeal — what else should one expect of a three-hour epic that takes you so deep into an American nightmare? — but grim predictability is a problem. Will the Joads find the paradise Ma envisages? We know they won't. They’ll find few or no jobs, orange farmers paying virtually nothing to temporary workers, storms, floods, hostile sheriffs, thugs who brand as “reds” those who ask questions — and maim, kill or burn them out of the grotty Hoovervilles where they briefly find sanctuary.

Since the only remotely kind people the Joads encounter are born-again Christians ordering them to repent, you wonder if the scales are too strongly tipped against them. Moreover, the period adverts projected on to the back — “try the train and travel while you sleep” — seem over-ironic.

And Oliver Cotton’s Casy, who accompanies the Joads west, is a bit preachy even for a preacher who has abandoned religion for a humanist belief in man’s collective soul. Yet he is Steinbeck’s voice, and Steinbeck, Galati and Church come up with memorable moments.

What does Rebecca Night’s Rose Joad do when her baby is stillborn? She offers her breast to a starving man: a gesture that evokes the play’s pain and generosity all at once.

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