In Arthur Miller’s first commercially successful play, All My Sons, the idyllic middle-class suburban existence of the mid-Western Kellers is interrupted by the collapse of a tree in their back garden. The sprawling apple tree, planted in commemoration of the Kellers’ eldest son Larry who never came home from war, sits centre stage in Ivo Van Hove’s production currently playing at the Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End.
All My Sons is a formulaic tragedy: a set of seemingly normal characters are introduced, and then a figure from their past arrives, dragging with them old secrets and jealousy and rage. In All My Sons it is Annie (Hayley Squires), Larry’s childhood sweetheart and soon to be the fiancée of the Kellers’ youngest son Chris (Paapa Essiedu).
Unlike her husband Joe (Bryan Cranston), Kate Keller (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) desperately believes that Larry will return. “Your brother’s alive, darling” she insists. As a result, she is willingly obstructive of Chris and Annie’s burgeoning romance; the last thing she wants is for her long-lost son to come home and see “Larry’s girl” shacking up with someone else, let alone his brother. Annie’s reappearance, and the suppressed emotions and dark secrets it exposes, pushes the Kellers into a painful spiral.
Though All My Sons is a perfectly formed play (it could as easily have been written by Henrik Ibsen), it is also one of Miller’s rawest. The family has many opportunities to avoid the fate it is heading towards and the audience is forced to sit there as each one goes wrong. The centripetal force of the drama is not the relationship between Annie and her lover, or Kate and her sons, but Joe and Chris. We watch their intimate father-son relationship slowly disintegrate. The chemistry between Cranston and Essiedu is flawless; Joe’s deflective jokes are the perfect foil to Chris’s wide-eyed innocence.
Annie’s mysterious return is not only consequential for her relationship with Chris, but for the wider Keller family, too. It drags up the long tail of a secret which Joe and Kate have been pushing away for years, involving Joe’s former business partner – and Annie’s father – who now languishes in prison.
Jean-Baptiste is exquisite as Kate; she is simultaneously desperate and stubborn, furious and gentle. As the play’s climax builds, she moves between wild emotion – a refusal to believe that her son is dead – and resigned fury. She is elegantly matched by Cranston’s foolishly avoidant Joe, whose descent from a light-hearted family man to a broken shell is split into four neat parts culminating in the play’s deadly conclusion. Cranston – of Breaking Bad fame – brings the calculating egotism of Walter White to his performance as Joe Keller.
But it is Essiedu who gives All My Sons its most searing moments. As Chris he is soft and kind, quietly determined to make Annie his wife and frustrated with his parents for not facing up to the reality of his brother’s death. He wants everyone to move on and to heal but finds himself up against his mother’s obstinacy and his father’s weakness. His spiral into depression is very powerful; it is a deeply physical performance without verging into melodrama. In the play’s final acts, all eyes are locked on Chris.
Annie is not the only unexpected character to make an unfortunate reappearance. The entrance of her brother, George (Tom Glynn-Carney) – who is boiling with untapped anger – gives play one of its bleakest moments. George – who emerges from the back of the auditorium, with his hood up and a beanie hat on, his limp greasy hair sticking to his face – looks dead behind the eyes. His arrival, like the collapse of Larry’s tree at the play’s opening, is a terrible omen of what will become of the Kellers. Harsh white light floods the stage, accompanied by the pang of a searching spotlight: Joe and Kate are being questioned, but so are Chris’s morals and George’s memories. As the events that led to the imprisonment of George and Annie’s father become clearer, so do the younger characters’ sense of themselves.
With piercing direction from Van Hove and a deftly talented cast, All My Sons squeezes every last drop of tragedy from Miller’s masterful text.
[See also: Ambika Mod is luminous and feral in Porn Play]
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