It came a
few days ago, as NT Live presented the play that started Arthur Miller
in 1946 on his career as the bard of modern age tragedy: All My Sons.
Originally,
the Barrymore had promoted a 2019 NT Live production starring Bill Pullman and
Sally Field. I’m not sure why, but the theater ended up showing one from the
2025-26 season at Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End, with Bryan Cranston
and Marianne Jean-Baptist in the same roles.
With all
due respect to Pullman and Field, it’s hard to imagine how they could equal,
let alone surpass, the two more recent leads for shattering impact.
Not all of director Ivo van Hove’s attempts to bring freshness to taken-for-granted classics are well advised, as I noted over the weekend about how he had (mis)handled Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.
As I began watching this performance,
I wondered how the elements of this stage design—a large tree, fallen
overnight; an unadorned house front; a lit overhead circular portal—would aid
or detract from this viewing experience.
But his
stripped-down production of Miller’s first Broadway success enables
contemporary audiences to focus on his talented performers, in a way that theatergoers
more than three-quarters of a century ago, fresh from reading about war
profiteers and experiencing losses in the struggle against totalitarianism, were
unlikely to have done.
For me,
the revelation here was Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whom I had only seen
previously in her Oscar-nominated turn in Secrets and Lies. As Kate
Keller, she seems to find untapped reserves of fury and sorrow as a wife and
mother unable to deal with the realizations that the crime of her
munitions-manufacturer husband and the wartime disappearance of her beloved
older son Larry might be linked in some way.
Though Bryan Cranston is familiar to TV viewers stateside from the long-running series Breaking
Bad and Malcolm in the Middle, he shows further evidence here that
the versatility he displayed onstage in Tony-winning roles in Network
and All the Way was no fluke.
He
masterfully strips away the thin membrane of respectability surrounding his
protagonist, Joe Keller: Seemingly cleared of charges of having okayed a
shipment of defective parts leading to the deaths of 21 pilots, he suddenly
finds himself facing the unwelcome appearance on his doorstep of the two
children of the business partner on whom he laid responsibility for the
transgression.
The English actress-playwright Hayley Squires brings the requisite amount of sweetness and steel as Larry’s fiancee, Ann Deever, who, as the first step in turning the page with an engagement to the Kellers’ younger son Chris, must find a way to get Kate to stop denying that Larry is dead.
And Tom Glynn-Carney is sullen and fierce as Ann’s brother George, who confronts
the Kellers with the truth they can no longer avoid.
In some
ways, Paapa Essiedu has the trickiest role as Chris, the surviving son
at sea: drawn to but bashful about courting Ann, chafing at inheriting from his
father a business that leaves him uninspired (“If I have to grub for money all
day long at least at evening I want it beautiful”), and loving his father while
struggling with the vague sense that something is wrong with the parent. He
brings fire to his late moment of revelation and resolution.
The first
in a quartet of Miller tragedies (followed by Death of a Salesman, The
Crucible, and A View From the Bridge) that traced American
socio-political dysfunction to a father’s failure to live up to a moral code, All
My Sons has been served well by this production that highlights why we are
still dealing with the playwright’s theme of corporate irresponsibility and the
remorseless pressures of capitalism.
The
Barrymore has also done well by bringing it to a select but appreciative
audience. I look forward to its NT Live production next month: John Millington
Synge’s tragicomedy of Irish country life, The Playboy of the Western World.
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