The current West End revival of Arthur Miller’s breakthrough play All My Sons comes to London with a distinguished pedigree. Director Ivo van Hove has staged Miller before, with his scintillating, career-making version of A View from the Bridge in London and New York, followed by The Crucible on Broadway. He and Bryan Cranston previously collaborated to spectacular effect in Network, which landed the actor both Olivier and Tony awards.
All extremely high bars, daunting even. But this production equals, if not clears them. It’s a phenomenal piece of theater, with van Hove’s direction, admirably served by Jan Versweyveld’s design, at its most restrained and resonant, giving Miller’s dissection of the American Dream the terrible, shuddering vibration of Greek Tragedy. This is enabled by an ensemble of uniform excellence, who milk every ounce of self-delusion, madness and quashed idealism from the text, along with a surprising sweetness from its ill-fated love story.
London has seen All My Sons quite recently, with Jeremy Herrin’s 2019 production starring Bill Pullman and Sally Field. That revival left its own, not inconsiderable mark; but the quick return of the play is testimony both to its increasing relevance — not least in the way that business practice continues to dominate political and social mores, certainly in the U.S. — and the room given for actors’ interpretations.
Van Hove and Versweyveld share a sensibility that manages to embrace both expressionistic minimalism and a penchant for showmanship, sometimes in the same setting.
The opening here is a fabulous example: a ferocious storm, thunder booming, the stage bare except for a giant tree, around which is draped the frail figure of a woman in a flimsy nightgown, Kate Keller (Marianne Jean-Baptiste). Suddenly the tree cracks and topples, amid a blaze of red light. It’s primal, thrilling (the British audience, not accustomed to clapping until the end of a play, applaud immediately). In an instant, it shouts out “Greek.”
The fallen tree will stay on stage for the rest of the play, with no other scenery, representing the Kellers’ yard in which the whole of the action takes place. High in the backdrop, a large, cut-out disc offers a window into the house, shining different colors as the drama progresses.
Cranston’s Joe Keller dominates the opening scenes, as he holds court to any one of the neighbors and local kids who happens by the yard. He couldn’t be more amiable — a baseball-capped, clownish, even slightly doddery old fella, whose whole persona seems to be based on making people happy.
Chief amongst these people is his son Chris (Paapa Essiedu), who works in his father’s manufacturing business, but has an idealistic bent and the air of someone who wants but doesn’t dare to forge his own path. Cranston and Essiedu convey a father-son bond of unusual closeness — hugging, play-fighting, joshing; but this physical proximity will be repeated at the end of the play to devastatingly different effect.
This is a community still feeling the affects of WWII. Chris returned from the war intact, but is still troubled by the fellow soldiers he lost, and feels guilty about the easy life he’s inheriting from his father. Moreover, his brother, Larry, went missing in action; and while Joe, Chris, Larry’s old girlfriend Ann Deever (Hayley Squires) and most everyone else accepts his death, his mother, Kate, does not. Her insistence that Larry will return keeps her husband and surviving son in a constant limbo, tiptoeing around her feelings.
Ann’s return home from New York is the catalyst that will smash this awkward stasis, but not in a good way, given that Chris and Ann want to marry. As Joe puts it to his son: “If you marry the girl, you are pronouncing him [Larry] dead.” And as Kate tells her husband, if Larry is dead, she will kill herself.
As she demonstrated in her last film, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Jean-Baptiste is highly adept at playing women whose vulnerability makes them ferociously difficult to deal with. Her twitchy, volcanic Kate keeps everyone on edge; though when she does warm to people, there’s a reminder of how she and her husband have remained pillars of their community.
There is, though, another wartime wound to deal with. During the war, Joe’s factory supplied defective aircraft cylinders to the Air Force, resulting in the deaths of 21 pilots. Joe was exonerated, while his partner Steve, Ann’s father, was not, and remains in prison. Now, Ann’s arrival in town is closely followed by that of her brother George (Tom Glynn-Carney), a lawyer who has just visited his father and has urgent news. Joe’s “talent for ignoring things” is about to be severely challenged.
One of the reasons the production exerts such power is the foundations laid by the cast, whose performances couldn’t be more tangibly flesh-and-blood in creating this community and its individuals. The scene between Essiedu and Squires, in which Chris and Ann finally acknowledge what their years-long written correspondence has meant to them both, is sweet, tender, awkwardly passionate and very affecting. And the frisson between George and the married neighbor Lydia (Aliyah Odoffin), meeting for the first time since he left for the war and clearly holding a candle for each other, carries the pathos of unfulfilled love.
The fragility of this society is also deep-rooted. Wearing a hoodie and with an extreme case of the shakes, Glynn-Carney’s George seems less like a lawyer than an addict, or a delinquent. In part, this is a result of the rage he’s now feeling, though when he mutters that he studied law in hospital, he reveals himself to be another casualty of war. And when Joe brags about the majors and colonels who now work on his factory floor, he sheds light on the cold welcome home for many veterans, now subservient to those who did not serve. It turns out that there are still many who believe Joe’s wealth is simply “loot, with blood on it.”
Ultimately, though, it’s the lies and self-deception that truly sound the play’s tragedy. As Joe’s own, criminal role in the aircraft order comes home to roost, Cranston brilliantly peels away the layers of his character. He shifts from a man cushioned by years of deceit to a slippery attempt to bribe his way out of it (having just changed into a suit and looking like quite the huckster) to a finally honest, but belligerent defense of his actions — it was business, he was only making money for his family — to a man completely crushed by the enormity of what he’s done.
Just like Joe, Kate has been hiding, her obsession with Larry’s survival being her twisted way of dealing with her own complicity in her husband’s actions. Facing them, Essiedu is towering as an idealist barely able to contain his disappointment and grief after his idolized father has been cruelly exposed. Squires admirably conveys Ann’s solid decency and emotional intelligence, just as she sees her hopes of happiness fading.
For the most part, van Hove stands back and lets his actors do the heavy lifting, which is a sign of a master director who understands exactly how to serve a text. The odd flourish serves either as audience relief (it’s fun to see Essiedu attack the tree with a chain saw), or to underpin the play’s moral warning, which can only reverberate in a Trumpian world where both domestic and foreign policy are part of “the deal.” So, when Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” plays during a curtain change, there’s at least a little hope of some real-world justice.
Venue: Wyndham’s Theatre, London
Cast: Bryan Cranston, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Paapa Essiedu, Tom Glynn-Carney, Hayley Squires, Aliyah Odoffin, Cath Whitefield, Richard Hansell, Zach Wyatt
Playwright: Arthur Miller
Director: Ivo van Hove
Set and lighting designer: Jan Versweyveld
Costume designer: An D’Huys
Sound designer: Tom Gibbons
Presented by Wessex Grove, Gavin Kalin Productions, Playful Productions
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