Bryan Cranston (Joe Keller), Paapa Essiedu (Chris Keller) and Hayley Squires (Ann Deever) in All My Sons. Photo: Jan Versweyveld
Wyndham’s theatre, London WC2, until 7 March
What is it with Ivo van Hove and Arthur Miller? By his own admission, the Belgian director found Miller boring for most of his career but it was his mythically stark production of A View from the Bridge that launched him in the UK a decade ago. “His plays are alarms,” Van Hove writes in his introduction to an edition of Miller’s plays, “waking us up to who we are, what we are becoming and the havoc we are wreaking.” Following some maximalist misfires (All About Eve, Opening Night), Van Hove has found his way back to Miller and produced another masterpiece. Lightning has struck twice.
We get actual lightning, too. Miller’s play opens on the morning after a storm but Van Hove gives us the storm. Kate Keller (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) wails through a shrieking gale like Lear on the heath and throws herself against a tree before it topples. It’s a brilliant innovation. When Van Hove cuts sharply to the placid aftermath, that thunderclap of violence is still ringing in our ears, just as the second world war still haunts the Keller family.
The tree was planted to commemorate their son Larry, missing in action and presumed dead, although Kate refuses to accept that. His absence is one shadow looming over the Kellers. The other is the conviction of all-American patriarch Joe (Bryan Cranston) for shipping cracked cylinder heads to the US Air Force, leading to the deaths of 21 pilots. He walked free on appeal by pinning the blame on his business partner Steve Deever. Now Steve’s daughter Annie (Hayley Squires) is back in town and leaving everyone comically bedazzled. She’s returned to woo Larry’s sweet and guileless brother Chris (Paapa Essiedu), but something else is rumbling beneath the affable patter. Joe speaks for everybody when he says: “I ignore what I gotta ignore.”
Cranston’s performance has dark flashes of Walter White from Breaking Bad when he is dressing up self-justification as harsh truths.
When it debuted in 1947, Miller’s reputation-making story of choices and consequences was compared to Ibsen. Van Hove, though, makes it as relentless as a Greek tragedy. His decision to abolish the interval reminded me of Robert Icke’s ticking-clock Oedipus a few months ago. In both plays, the decisive events have already happened, years earlier, and need only be exposed and acknowledged. The truth lies in wait like an unexploded bomb. “You can run on for a long time,” we hear Johnny Cash sing between scenes. “Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down.”
The production lays siege to Miller’s naturalism. Jan Versweyveld’s set is simplicity itself — the felled tree, a doorway, a circular window which doubles as a celestial orb — but he uses lighting to take the play’s psychological temperature. It begins with the warm sun of the American Century, turns ice-blue in ominous moments, and finally melts into queasy unreality: a lava-lamp shimmer of blue, green and pink.
All-star casts don’t always pay off but this ensemble is breathtakingly good. While Essiedu’s feline charisma makes it slightly implausible that Chris would feel awkward around girls, it makes plain why he is unwittingly dangerous. Like Ibsen’s protagonists in The Wild Duck and An Enemy of the People, Chris is a thoroughly honest man whose unbending conscience poses an existential threat to a community sustained by cowardice and denial. As his neighbour Sue (Cath Whitefield) snaps: “Chris makes people want to be better than it’s possible to be.”
Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Kate Keller) and Paapa Essiedu (Chris Keller). Photo: Jan Versweyveld
Jean-Baptiste’s Kate swings from sympathetic victim to ruthless conspirator. George (Tom Glynn-Carney), who crashes in from the rear of the theatre like an intruder off the street, is a wild-eyed avenger and Annie a reluctant one. Even the Kellers’ neighbours are full-blooded and fascinating in this production. There are no weak links.
Cranston was magnificent as the deranged anchorman Howard Beale in Van Hove’s 2017 adaptation of Network but Joe Keller gives him more to work with. His performance has shades of Jack Lemmon — the ingratiating, folksy charm that turns to wheedling under pressure — with dark flashes of Walter White from Breaking Bad when he is dressing up self-justification as harsh truths. If it’s a dirty, compromised world, he demands, “why am I bad?” Because Chris expects him to be better. More havoc is wrought by pragmatists than by monsters.
The play builds towards an outbreak of generational warfare as father and son realise that they have very different notions of what a country should be, and what its citizens owe each other. To Chris, America is a family; to Joe, it’s a business. The world, he declares, boils down to “dollars and cents, nickels and dimes, war and peace”.
A certain president might say those words, just as those cracked cylinder heads could be the cladding on Grenfell Tower. It's startling how current this definitive postwar play feels. Miller wrote that it was “designed to bring a man into the direct path of the consequences he has wrought”, which is something people still try to avoid. Although All My Sons is too rich a play to be didactic, its moral clarity is thrilling and terrifying. You can lie and deny and cover up the damage you have done but sooner or later, God’ll cut you down
