I was greatly moved by Simon McBurney's current sellout Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's play All My Sons when I caught a recent, pre-election, matinee. But, it wasn't until I stayed up through the night in London to watch Barack Obama sweep all before him, that I finally grasped in what particular way McBurney's production delivers. I wonder, is it possible for a theatre production to be politically prescient; to capture the mood of the times without fully realising it?
By lifting a 1947 text out of anything resembling naturalism, and adding film and video footage that lands it in the here and now, the English director has turned a quintessentially American domestic drama into a piece about human interconnectedness and social responsibility. In this staging, the "all" of the title carries real force: no one is left out of Miller's critique.
There are, of course, Broadway precedents for this approach. In 1994, Stephen Daldry won the Tony Award for best director for his New York version of An Inspector Calls, a JB Priestley play which curiously, like Miller's, dates from 1947. Daldry's production smashed open the Birling family confines, to confront them with a broader, more brooding world beyond. Similarly, All My Sons offers a stage full of unnamed witnesses to events who pay silent acknowledgment to a story of misdeeds, deception, and passing the buck - in other words, the very stuff of which the Bush regime was made.
This ability to elide the public and the private - to find the political impetus in what could be merely familial - gives a genuine sting to McBurney's production, which couldn't be further removed from the drearily literal-minded revival that played a few doors down on 45th Street, in 1987. Much of those elisions rang out to many of us when Obama emerged in the wee hours of Wednesday morning to deliver his acceptance speech. There were, of course, the entirely proper tributes to his wife and daughters, but those came after Obama's history-making acknowledgment of a citizenry seen fully in the round: not just Democrat or Republican, black or white, but also "Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled, and non-disabled." In eight years of Dubya, I don't recall the current president even voicing those words.
In any case, All My Sons is presently playing to the sorts of crowds usually associated with large-scale musicals. This can't all be attributed to the fact that it features Katie Holmes (aka Mrs Tom Cruise), in a feisty, perfectly credible supporting turn. I think much of the show's success derives from the same desire for clarity, truth-telling and America's overdue reckoning with itself that has helped land Obama the White House. Last month, I wrote about Broadway's apparent reluctance to tap into the mood of the times, but that was before this play had opened. Now that it has, drama shows itself capable of buttonholing all of us right here, right now. Arthur Miller would, I suspect, be pleased.
