Theatre review: Broken Glass

After a wobbly start to the Young Vic's new regime - a Mr Sloane that bafflingly ironed the gay out of Joe Orton, and a Bengal Tiger that was just baffling in general - it settles into a stronger groove with Jordan Fein's take on Arthur Miller. The Broken Glass in his 1994 play is Kristallnacht, the 1938 attacks on Jewish businesses that became the first major sign of the extent to which Nazi Germany was willing to turn its antisemitic rhetoric into action. As stories and photos appear in the newspapers worldwide, New Yorker Sylvia Gellburg (Pearl Chanda) suddenly loses the ability to walk. Referred to Dr Hyman (Alex Waldmann,) he and the experts he consults with are unable to find a physical cause for her disability, and he starts to lean towards theories of something psychosomatic: Confronted with both these brutal images and everyone around her's seemingly blasé responses to them, part of Sylvia has shut down.

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.

Theatre review: A View From The Bridge

It's ten years since Ivo van Hove's production of A View From The Bridge not only made a star of the Belgian director in London and New York, but also tangibly influenced the way a lot of theatre has been approached since then. It feels a lot more recent than a decade, but then all that influence is probably part of that (along with the fact that I have seen it a bit more recently than that, as a streamed recording during lockdown.) So in some respects it probably is time for someone to revisit Arthur Miller's domestic tragedy as a whole new generation can see it with fresh eyes; but for many of us it'll be slightly odd to see a production that keeps the original details and trappings of post-War New York, where Italian-American families live under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and work - when they can find work - loading and unloading ships on the docks.

Theatre review: Death of a Salesman

Spoiler alert: The salesman still dies.

If London's unofficial Arthur Miller festival has been all about the playwright's unforgiving criticism of capitalism, it's only fitting that its finale is Death of a Salesman, in which an unremarkable man gives his life to the system in hope of its promised rewards, and is instead discarded by it as soon at his usefulness is done. But as is very clear in Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell's production this is actually the tragedy of two men, father and son, each broken by a different aspect of what the American Dream promised them. Willy Loman (Wendell Pierce) is a 63-year-old travelling salesman who's been doing the job since his teens, and returns home early from a trip after a near-miss car accident. It's one of many in recent months and his wife Linda (Sharon D. Clarke) has reason to believe they've not been accidents at all but suicide attempts.

Theatre review: All My Sons

After a pair of more obscure plays a couple of months ago, this year's second brace of Arthur Miller plays offers up some of his most famous works; once again the Old Vic is involved in this unofficial mini-season, with Jeremy Herrin's starry production of Miller's early hit All My Sons. Bill Pullman (he's the Bill who's still alive) plays Joe Keller, a businessman whose factory became notorious during the Second World War when it was exposed as having provided faulty aircraft parts that led to the deaths of 21 airmen. Bill was exonerated but his business partner is still in jail for it. His own son Larry wasn't flying one of the affected planes but he disappeared on a mission, and three years after the end of the War everyone's accepted he must be dead except for his mother Kate (SALLY FIELD!) who still holds onto the hope that he might return. But her other son Chris (Colin Morgan) had returned home with news that will make her have to confront the facts.

Theatre review: The American Clock

London's improptu Arthur Miller festival continues with my second of his more obscure works in a week. The Old Vic will be featuring one of the more famous plays in a couple of months when All My Sons opens, but first The American Clock, which has another close link to The Price in that it's once again a story of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the resulting Depression. Except this is a much more on-the-nose approach, a sweeping review of the way people were affected throughout America, although it does have a single Jewish family at its heart, played in Rachel Chavkin's production by three sets of actors: We follow Moe Baum, initially played by James Garnon, his wife Rose (Clare Burt) and teenaged son Lee (Fred Haig - you know when you suddenly realise something like "oh he must be David Haig's son seeing as how they have the same last name and THE EXACT SAME FACE" and then feel stupid for not noticing it the first second you saw him? That.)

Theatre review: The Price

I’m not aware of any particular Arthur Miller milestone this year (both his centenary and the tenth anniversary of his death would have been in 2015) so maybe it’s just a case of everyone having the same idea that’s led to so many theatres staging his work this year. In a couple of months’ time two of his most famous works will be back in London but first a couple of lesser-known pieces; and while at times The Price justifies its comparative obscurity, for most of its lengthy running time Jonathan Church’s production makes a strong case for the revival. Both written and set in the 1960s, the story is nevertheless rooted in the Depression of the ‘30s. The Franz family were children of New York millionaires who lost everything in the Crash except for their house; their mother having died around the same time, they moved everything into the attic so they could let out the rest of the building.

Theatre review: Finishing the Picture

Arthur Miller must have spent half his life being asked to write about Marilyn Monroe, and in his final play he did. Finishing the Picture may take place on the set of an unnamed 1961 film with fictional creatives, but there’s little question what the inspiration is: The film is the famously troubled The Misfits, the safari-suited director Derek (Stephen Billington) is John Huston, and the screenwriter Paul (Jeremy Drakes,) married to the unpredictable leading lady, is Miller himself. We never see Kitty, the film’s star, but she’s all anyone talks about. The production is nearing the end of its filming schedule – and budget – and the new producer, Philip (Oliver Le Sueur,) has flown in to see what’s holding up the final scenes. These all require Kitty, but she refuses to leave her trailer; even on the rare occasions she’s attempted to perform, the camera’s easily picked up how heavily sedated she is so the footage is unusable.

Theatre review: Incident at Vichy

Arthur Miller remains popular and respected enough that rediscoveries of his obscure work always do well - the Finborough's latest has already sold out its run and added a couple of extra matinees. But unlike No Villain audiences won't find something that echoes his more famous work too closely, as director Phil Willmott's contention is that Incident at Vichy is the closest Miller came to absurdism. The setting is a concrete and frightening enough one though: In the early days of the Nazi occupation of France, several men are taken off the streets of Vichy; some have their papers checked, some have their noses measured. They're left in a waiting room and called in one by one to be seen by a German scientist (Timothy Harker.) Most are Jewish, although given the rumours they've heard they don't mention that at first, only using the euphemism "Peruvian."

Theatre review: No Villain

The Finborough must be kicking themselves to have missed this one, not only a forgotten play by one of the 20th century's great dramatists but his first, and never previously staged to boot. Arthur Miller wrote No Villain at university - in six days - because he was broke, and the Avery Hopwood playwrighting award offered a $250 top prize. He won the award and the money, but evidently the competition didn't actually extend to producing the winning script, and it got filed away. As Miller went on to become a celebrated playwright the existence of No Villain doesn't seem to have been much of a secret - director Sean Turner found mention of it in Miller's published memoirs, which is where his interest was piqued. But as it's a common phenomenon for a prolific writer's best-known plays to be revived constantly while others gather dust, I'm not entirely surprised that nobody before Turner had actually bothered to seek out a copy and see if it was worth staging.

Theatre review: Death of a Salesman

Spoiler alert: The salesman dies.

Arthur Miller's centenary year hasn't, so far, resulted in a vast amount of London revivals of his work - they're probably still afraid of comparisons to last year's runaway hit. But a little further afield the First Lady of the RSC, Antony Sher, takes on the title role in Miller's most famous work, and the quintessential American tragedy. In Death of a Salesman Willy Loman (Sher) has worked all his life to pay off a mortgage that's finally about to be completed. But this doesn't coincide with financial security as, now in his sixties and succumbing to dementia, he's no longer the salesman he once was. With all his loyal contacts dead or retired, his long journeys around New England now see him return to Brooklyn empty-handed - and the company's new boss won't be willing to keep him on just for old times' sake.

Re-review: A View From The Bridge

You can read my original review here, of the production that eventually made it to #2 in my best shows of 2014 - a result only unusual in that most other blogs and reviews put Ivo van Hove's production of A View From The Bridge at #1. The original cast from the Young Vic's production has come along for the West End transfer to Wyndhams, led by Mark Strong as Eddie Carbone, the Brooklyn longshoreman whose tragedy is that he never recognises his own attraction to his niece Katie (Phoebe Fox,) even as it makes him bring his life crashing down around him. The production originally played in thrust, something Jan Versweyveld's design attempts to replicate by putting two banks of seating on stage, either side of the enclosed performance area; it's a successful recreation of the design, and even from a seat much further away than last time, I didn't feel the experience was lessened - after all, the effect was always one of making us distant, helpless observers of the inevitable tragedy.

Theatre review: The Crucible

Will the critics still shit stars all over the Old Vic once Kevin Spacey leaves? I can't help but wonder after the newspapers heaped praise over Yaël Farber's production of The Crucible. Arthur Miller wrote his play about the Salem witch trials in the wake of McCarthyism, in which he was caught up; but it functions just as well as a metaphor for any mass hysteria in which accusation is treated as the same as guilt in the court of public opinion. In Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, fear of witchcraft is rife. A group of teenage girls are glimpsed dancing naked in the woods, and divert attention from themselves by pinning the blame elsewhere, accusing various local women of being in league with the devil. This escalates quickly into a trial where half the town seems to stand accused, and the only way to avoid hanging is to confess - and give the court another name to go after.

Theatre review: A View From The Bridge

Arthur Miller imagined commuters using the Brooklyn Bridge and barely registering, let alone caring, that there were people living in the neighbourhoods around it. Hence the title of A View From The Bridge, in which Miller imagines the stuff of classical tragedy taking place in the cramped apartments of Red Hook. A mostly Italian-American neighbourhood, it will sometimes see families putting up illegal immigrants from Italy, fleeing desperate poverty and glad to find work on the docks, hoping nobody rats them out to Immigration. Eddie Carbone (Mark Strong) has just put up such a pair of his wife's relatives, brothers from Sicily. Marco (Emun Elliot) is a married man sending money back to his wife and children and hoping to return to them when he's made enough; but Rodolpho (Luke Norris) is single, entranced by the bright lights of America and determined to make his life there.

Theatre review: The American Clock

In recent years a number of theatres have commissioned new plays looking at the current financial crisis, its causes and historical precedents. True to form, Neil McPherson at the Finborough has instead done some digging to find a theatrical great who'd already written such a play, only for it to fall into obscurity. Arthur Miller's The American Clock was nominated for an Olivier in 1986 but hasn't been seen in London since. Arthur A. Robertson (Patrick Poletti) was a wealthy businessman who predicted the Great Depression, put all his money into gold and managed to hold onto his wealth as a consequence, able to observe the chaos the USA fell into in the 1930s. Robertson acts as narrator, as Miller uses Studs Terkel's book of interviews Hard Times as inspiration to tell the stories of dozens of people who faced financial ruin.