This Steinbeck saga's as wooden as the rocking chair on the porch: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Netflix's East Of Eden

East Of Eden (Netflix) 

Rating: Two out of five stars  

Mind those matches. Netflix is doing Great American Literature again, and that means everything is highly flammable – timber houses, log barns and truckloads of wooden acting.

British actors, when performing Shakespeare, can't help striking a pose and declaiming. 

Something similar happens across the Atlantic to actors tackling Hemingway or, in this case, Steinbeck. They swell up, like pine planks in wet weather, and seize rigid.

Every line is recited in a monotone, with equal weight given to each syllable, robbing the language of rhythm and melody. 

American audiences seem to think this signifies soul and depth. Most of the time, it sounds as though the cast are reading from barely legible prompt cards.

East Of Eden is the John Steinbeck book most students don't actually get round to reading, after they finish The Grapes Of Wrath. 

It's also the James Dean movie that film fans are least likely to watch, trailing far behind Rebel Without A Cause and Giant – though that's largely because those films co-starred Natalie Wood and Elizabeth Taylor, and East Of Eden didn't.

The Hollywood adaptation was directed by Elia Kazan, and this remake is the work of his granddaughter Zoe Kazan, so it's a family epic in every sense.

The novel stretches from the aftermath of the US Civil War to the entry of American forces into the First World War.

The James Dean version ignored the first three-quarters and cut straight to the melodramatic finale. 

By the time you've slogged through the first couple of episodes of this mini-series, you'll understand why.

In the opening sequence, a woman in a bloodstained smock hauls herself across a ploughed field, onto a wooden porch, where she grabs at an empty rocking chair. 

The whole scene is literally groaning and creaking, and no one has spoken a word yet.

The woman is Cathy (Florence Pugh), and she arrives like a wooden wedge, hammered in to drive apart brothers Charles and Adam (Mike Faist and Christopher Abbott). 

One man has spent his life running the family farm and hating it. The other was a US cavalryman for ten years, butchering Native Americans and hating it.

'I fear father damned us to the wrong fates,' intones Charles, like he is reading his lines from a lectern in church. 

Both sons detest the old boy, a war veteran, though it's obvious they've inherited many of his cruel traits, and especially their acting ability, from his wooden leg.

Pugh clearly believes in her role as the malevolent Cathy. Though she's barely conscious throughout the opening scene, her eyelids are flickering like a lizard's.

But she disappears from the story after that, and it's a long time before she can take centre stage.

The rest is sententious and self-consciously literary, the sort of television that has a symphonic soundtrack because Great Art requires an orchestra... just as Great Acting requires a carpenter.