Bryan Cranston and Marianne Jean-Baptiste deliver near pitch perfect performances as Joe and Kate Keller, a husband and wife shutting out unbearable wartime truths, in Ivo van Hove’s searing, morally forceful revival of Arthur Miller’s 1946 play. This is an ensemble piece in which the Breaking Bad star and the sometime muse to Mike Leigh are matched by Paapa Essiedu as their righteous son Chris and Hayley Squires as Ann Deever, the girl he wants to marry.
Expressionistically designed by Jan Versweyveld, it runs 130 minutes without an interval, and in that time gathers a relentless, implacable momentum and profound emotional clout. With costumes that include Adidas trainers and a hoodie as well as more generic garb, it somehow both adheres to its period setting and transcends it. Despite a stumble on the late preview to which critics were invited, it’s an astonishing, deeply moving piece of theatre.
The only substantial features of the design are a large tree – dramatically toppled in the opening storm, where a distraught Kate is buffeted by a blizzard of leaves – and a circular aperture on the burnished back wall. This does duty as a dreamy, warm Midwestern sun, a baleful moon and a window into the Kellers’ home and their souls. The russet leaves linger, adhering to clothes like Remembrance poppies, which is apt.
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The Kellers’ eldest son Larry went missing in the war and is presumed dead by everyone apart from Kate. Larry and Ann, the daughter of Joe’s deputy at his manufacturing firm, were sweethearts. But she moved to New York after her father was convicted of supplying faulty components for fighter planes that caused the deaths of 21 pilots: a crime for which Joe was controversially exonerated. When Chris lures her back, she’s followed by her vengeful brother George (Tom Glynn-Carney in an impactful cameo). There’s a sense of chickens coming home to roost.
After that opening storm, we are pitched into the warmly tactile affection between the Keller men. Cranston’s Joe is a genial, folksy, slightly dufferish paterfamilias; Chris a bright, husky, all-American boy, his easy, loose-limbed charisma slightly tempered by the deaths he witnessed in war. Both initially act as if Kate is mad, deranged by the loss of Larry. Slowly, slowly it is revealed that Kate must believe Larry is alive because to concede he is dead would mean admitting a more shattering truth, that will blight the future happiness of all concerned.
Jean-Baptiste is magnificent as Kate, consumed by grief and conflicting emotion. Cranston is also superb as a superficially affable man lying to himself. At one point in the performance I was at, he dried and had to be helped back into his lines by Essiedu: but the love between father and son was so richly drawn by that stage, it somehow worked as an act of filial devotion.
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Essiedu is riveting to watch as Chris moves from pent-up apprehension to bafflement and then rage. Ann is frequently objectified – everyone comments on how she’s grown, her weight, her legs – but Squires imbues her with a quiet gravitas, even when the focus is off her. Indeed, every character is thoughtfully cast and attentively served here. I’d never before registered the thwarted affection between George and local girl Lydia (the reliably striking Aliyah Odoffin).
Van Hove’s star-studded work can be sublime (Hedda Gabler, A Little Life), indifferent (his National Theatre adaptation of Network with Cranston) or dreadful (All About Eve, Opening Night). But his 2015 A View from a Bridge was a hit here and in New York, where his 2016 The Crucible was also a smash.
Perhaps Miller is his touchstone, the writer’s apparent naturalism somehow sparking with his stark and dynamic stage techniques, which here include a menacing soundtrack of strings, metronomic ticking and Johnny Cash, and moments of sudden floodlighting. In this All My Sons, we see a great writer, a visionary director and a superlative cast all chiming in harmony.
To 7 March, allmysonsplay.com
