Bryan Cranston, in the press night of All My Sons at Wyndham’s Theatre, proved himself to be the acting equivalent of Muhammad Ali: he floats like a butterfly but stings like a bee, delivering a devastatingly fine performance that makes this production of Arthur Miller’s first landmark play into a West End blockbuster everyone should try to see. A highly philosophical play challenging the brutality that is the oxygen of power and the American Dream, it’s worthy of arm wrestling your grandmother for the ticket she casually mentioned that she nabbed at 9am on the day they were released.
It’s remarkable to think that All My Sons was only Miller’s second play, for it has all the purity and polish of a laser-cut flawless diamond, nor has it lost any of its sparkle in the almost 80 years since it first premiered on Broadway in 1947. With all the emotional charge you’d expect from a work written just after WWII when the British and American governments united in dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to force Japan to surrender, Miller cleverly miniaturised his own wartime tale to resonate with the average man in the street whom he later believed experienced “soul-rot” for accepting the unacceptable, for although the atomic bombings did bring about the war’s conclusion, an estimated 240,000 Japanese citizens lost their lives, prompting him to ask his audience whether some deeds are beyond justification.
Cranston leads the cast as Joe Keller, a retired American businessman whom Miller introduces as an easy-going, good-humoured fellow who spends his mornings chewing the fat with his neighbours Frank Lubey (Zach Wyatt) and Dr Jim Bayliss (Richard Hansell) and reading ads in the newspaper, and he tellingly admits that he never reads the news pages anymore. But don’t be taken in by this backyard neighbourhood scene, the thunder and lightning that hurtles us into the first act, brilliantly devised by set and lighting designer, Jan Versweyveld, and which almost gives the audience a simultaneous cardiac arrest, warns us not to be taken in by Miller’s ruses or to become complacent about the nature of this play despite the many witty lines rippling through this masterpiece of a script. All My Sons is most certainly not some cutesy family-come-neighbourly drama.
It’s not the first time that the Belgian Versweyveld and his artistic and life partner, director Ivo Van Hove, have tackled Miller: becoming household names in British theatre following their lauded collaboration on the 2014 production of Miller’s A View from the Bridge which opened at the Young Vic before transferring to Wyndham’s. And the dynamic duo have picked up where they left off with this utterly absorbing interpretation: handling the playwright’s signature checks and balances of comedy and tragedy in a way that would even floor a Miller scholar, never likely to find a more assured revival.
All the action takes place outside the Keller’s house and is all the more resonant due to Versweyveld’s striking set and lighting design. Wholly without stage property, save for a ‘tree’ which is felled during the electrifying storm sequence which opens act one: a woman, whom we later know to be Joe’s wife Kate (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), holding onto the trunk for dear life. As if Miller is declaring that man can never compete with Nature, the tree lies horizontally across the stage for the duration of this suspenseful drama, while a backdrop intended to be the back of the Keller’s house features a circular portal, lit at different times to represent the sun or moon, whilst being large enough for members of the cast to appear within its opening.
The tree was planted three years ago as a memorial to Kate and Joe’s son, Larry, when he was reported missing in action, yet Kate refuses to believe that he is dead, much to the uneasiness of the Kellers’ surviving son Chris (Paapa Essiedu): a young man all too conscious that he is to inherit Joe’s business empire and which he threatens to walk away from if his parents (especially his mother) refuse to get behind him marrying Larry’s old sweetheart Ann Deever (Hayley Squires). Sensing Chris’s intentions, Kate is on edge when Ann comes to stay following an invitation from Chris, for she not only sees a union between the pair as forcing her to accept that Larry won’t return, but she also wonders whether Ann, the daughter of Joe’s former business partner, Steve, is seeking vengeance on his behalf for something we only gradually learn about.
A sensitive young man, in the habit of towing his father’s line, Chris holds firm when Joe urges him to give up the idea of marrying Ann for Kate’s sake, recognising that it is only her faith in a possible miracle which sustains her. Cranston and Jean-Baptiste, the two most senior actors in this ensemble, are generous enough to allow the other cast members their moment to shine, which indeed they do, including Cath Whitefield as the jealous doctor’s wife, Sue Bayliss, who amusingly asks Ann to move away if she marries Chris: for she observes how dissatisfied the doctor is and how he has drooled over the beautiful Ann. Aliyah Oddfin is a ray of sunshine as Lydia Lubey, though she is jolted out of her contentment in family life when her old flame, George, played with disturbing intensity by Tom Glynn-Carney, turns up to stop his sister Ann marrying Chris.
Jean-Baptise is a revelation as Kate, an inherently maternal woman whose blind faith in her son being alive causes her to seesaw between warmth and ferocity. She pretends not to see that their neighbours despise them and have done from the moment Joe’s company was held responsible for supplying the army with 120 cracked engine heads, leading to the deaths of 21 US pilots during WWII. Joe might still be a ‘success’ on paper, having held onto his business despite serving jail time, yet his friends see him as a failure for his yellow-bellied-cowardice in placing the blame entirely at the door of his partner and Ann’s father, Steve Deever: an act which has only reinforced Joe’s avarice to all who know him. Avoiding jail after an appeal which absolved him of responsibility due to his claim of having been in bed with pneumonia on the day the parts were shipped, we all know that it wasn’t a coin toss of fate or an accident but a catastrophic judgement founded in self-preservation.
No playwright harnesses the parallels of human nature and the ugliness of greed more powerfully than Miller, creating a work of truth and reckoning which fuses all that we have witnessed since the cradle. A guilty man will sit in his seat none too easy while Cranston takes the audience on the emotional journey of Joe Keller: transforming before our eyes from a confident bluffer ever ready with an excuse, to a repentant sinner who at last owns his failings. Or does he merely do so when backed into a corner and unable to control the misalignment of his stars? Joe’s sons were the conscience he never had, with Essiedu delivering a heartbreaking portrayal of Chris, a young man overwhelmed with shame and disappointment: “I know you’re no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”
It’s perhaps only on leaving the theatre after a performance lasting just over 2 hours straight through, followed by a standing ovation, that it will begin to dawn on you that you’ve just seen one of the most jaw-smacking productions of your lifetime, even were you to catch a West End show every month for the rest of your days. You might also begin to digest how All My Sons demands a masterful cast working in perfect harmony for full justice to be done to Miller and the many threads that go into making this one of the great literary works of the 20th century. The more you ponder on it, the more it’s impossible to imagine how the playwright could have envisaged a more convincing antihero than Cranston as Keller, who makes his desire to pass on his legacy to his sons at any cost seem entirely natural.
All My Sons at Wyndham’s Theatre booking until 7th March 2026. Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes with no interval. For more information please visit the website.
Photography by Jan Versweyveld.
