Theatre review: All My Sons

Outside of Belgium and the Netherlands, it was A View From The Bridge that really announced Ivo van Hove as a big-name director, and more than a decade later he returns to Arthur Miller in a production that mirrors a lot of what made that show distinctive, without feeling like an outright copy. In fact visually this seems, if not a complete change of aesthetic, definitely freed from the very strict house style that has sometimes felt like a straitjacket in recent years. So An D'Huys' costumes are timeless rather than aggressively, anachronistically modern, and Jan Versweyveld's set, though still minimalist, has an almost Japanese spareness dominated by a large sun-like window, and a stage scattered with petals that could be cherry blossom: All My Sons opens with a tree crashing to the ground during a storm.

Wandering the garden in the middle of the night, Kate Keller (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) witnesses the fall of a tree planted a couple of years earlier to commemorate her son, a pilot whose plane went missing during the Second World War.

But she refuses to believe he's dead, taking comfort from newspaper articles about MIA soldiers returning years later, and the horoscopes her neighbour Frank (Zach Wyatt) writes for her. Her husband Joe (Bryan Cranston) humours her but surviving son Chris (Transphobia Ltd. Employee Paapa Essiedu) is planning to propose to Ann (Hayley Squires,) the late Larry's childhood sweetheart. It'll be the final proof to Kate that nobody else believes he could be alive, but the reasons she's clinging on to her delusion may be even more complex than a mother's grief.

Cranston's Joe has echoes of the actor's most famous role, starting as an apparently likeable everyman who's admired by the local doctor Jim (Richard Hansell) and beloved by the local kids including Jim's son Bert (Sammy Jones, alternating with Charles Dark and Zayne Tayabali.) But Jim's wife Sue (Cath Whitefield) is barely suppressing the neighbours' real feelings about Joe, and his role in supplying the Air Force with faulty parts that resulted in the deaths of 21 pilots.

The suspicion that he let his business partner - Ann's father, who's still in prison - take the fall gives way to certainty when Ann's brother George (Tom Glynn-Carney,) arrives with news; but it's Ann who has the killer blow up her sleeve. It's Joe's relentless "this is everybody's fault but mine" blaming of his family for his own war profiteering that really tips him over into villain status. Like his last foray into Miller this is van Hove exposing the classical tragedy underneath, with Cranston playing less of a flawed hero, more the monster whose greed and hubris come back to destroy him.

The performances around him are subtle but with the characters' true natures out in the open from the start: Jean-Baptiste's Kate is unmistakably broken, while Essiedu has to imagine what it's like to genuinely reject profiting from something you're morally opposed to, an idealism the reality of the world will constantly destroy Chris for. George is a small but memorable part, as far from the superficially slick but internally traumatised lawyer, Glynn-Carney gives us an almost ghost-like figure who wanders back into the action like Nina in The Seagull.

I could have done with a few minor text cuts if van Hove is so set on playing this at nearly two-and-a-half hours without an interval: It becomes painfully apparent (literally, in West End seats,) how much of the final act is spent with characters telling us they're about to say something before they actually say it. I also think it might be, for me, a little bit too soon after the very memorable 2019 production to have the full impact. But there's no denying this is van Hove back on form, reinventing, clarifying and exposing the text, sometimes making the increasing tension and dread a physical experience.

All My Sons by Arthur Miller is booking until the 7th of March at Wyndham's Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Jan Versweyveld.