Day of the Locust – Pleasance Courtyard ★★★

The Hollywood dream has always contained a nightmare. When Nathanael West published The Day of the Locust in 1939, he looked beyond the glamour of the movie industry and focused instead on those marooned at its edges: aspiring actors, failed artists, displaced workers and hopeful migrants who had travelled west believing California would transform their lives. What he found was a landscape of disappointment, resentment and simmering social unrest. Almost ninety years later, that vision feels uncomfortably contemporary. Callum Patrick Hughes and David Shopland’s adaptation understands that from the outset.Rather than treating West’s novel as a literary artefact, they present it as a warning. Through storytelling, live soundscapes and looping technology, Hughes draws explicit parallels between the frustrations of Depression-era Los Angeles and contemporary America, where dreams of prosperity and belonging continue to collide with exclusion, inequality and political anger. What emerges…

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