Writer: Arthur Miller
Director: Ivo van Hove
The last time Ivo van Hove bought a big production of Arthur Miller to the West End was now a decade ago, and his adaptation of A View from the Bridge proved to be one of the all-time greats, entirely revelatory in its perception and utterly consuming as an emotional experience. His revival of All My Sons, now playing at the Wyndhams Theatre, doesn’t quite reach those heights, largely thanks to a sluggish opening act, but as the pitch builds across Acts Two and Three, this is really not very far at all from van Hove at his best, as a director who above all things understands the unrelenting power of human-made tragedy.
Eagerly anticipating the arrival of former neighbour Ann, whom he hopes to marry, Chris and his father Joe wake up one morning to discover that the tree they planted for Chris’s brother Larry has blown down. Lost in the war, his mother Kate fervently believes Larry will return any day and everyone should hold their lives in readiness, especially Ann, who was once his fiancée. But as truths about the war emerge, the fragile bonds holding this family together rapidly come apart.
Revered among the great mid-century American dramatists, Miller’s distinct ability to hold different perspectives in check simultaneously is also characteristic of van Hove’s approach to the writer, and here we see both the personal, family stories of love, loss and endless grief in constant dialogue with the values of America both when this is set and in its history, as attitudes to military personnel and civilians, to good US manufacturing and to war profiteering move through All My Sons alongside the small town issues of social standing, reputation and individual justice. And van Hove really elucidates the power that men like Joe Keller wield in their societies, factory owners who employ hundreds of people, with both wealth and influence that gives them a veneer of respectability and a freedom that the play dramatically and poignantly undermines.
Notably, too, in this new adaptation, running at an unbroken 130 minutes, is the emphasis on the economics of romance, with two long-standing couples noting the importance of money in keeping families together. Ann is advised by the Kellers’ neighbour to pick someone who can pay for her life, and later, in an argument, Joe defends his actions by focusing on his monetary contribution to their marriage. So, for all the talk of love in Act One, as Chris and Ann come together, Miller and van Hove chart the more mercenary motivations that sit beneath the surface and are vital to the outcome of All My Sons when profit is placed over moral compunction.
As with A View from the Bridge, van Hove brings a thrumming sense of Greek tragedy to proceedings, an inevitability that picks up in Act Two and really takes hold as the family confrontations begin, tense and breathless affairs as characters start to see themselves and each other as they really are. A notion of broken heroism feeds through from the military glories of the war as Larry and Chris’ experience as pilots is discussed to Chris being held up as a moral exemplar by the neighbours who cannot emulate his purity and drive, to the final showdown when both Joe as the perfect father and Larry as the faultless lost son are pulled apart – the great tragedy of All My Sons, and of this version in particular, is that everyone is projecting unearned perfection on everyone else with devastating consequences.
van Hove has rejected many of the techniques for which he has come under fire in recent years, and there is not a camera in sight, although Jan Versweyveld’s representative set, cluttered by the broken tree, suffers from being not quite fully staged but also not enough of a blank canvas, although, as ever, his cinematic lighting is masterful. However, the ambiguous set never stands in the way of the performances that grow naturalistically and become ever more consumed as the stakes rise.
Brian Cranston opts for a brash, self-satisfied Joe, very different from the intellectual gravitas of Bill Pullman’s interpretation for the Old Vic’s 2019 production, but his surface all-American confidence conceals a petty nastiness that is entirely credible while Marianne Jean-Baptiste is superb as the fragile Kate looking for signs and other worldly hints that her beloved son is still alive, buried entirely in her grief as though time stopped when Larry went to war. Papa Essiedu is shattering as Chris learning that his life and all the things he believed in are nothing like he imagined, and the always compelling Hayley Squires is magnificent as Ann, full of agency, determined to control her own life, still partly swept up in the dreamlike joy of the family she once knew but entirely a pragmatist determined to make the life she wants.
There’s nothing bigger than family, Chris tells his father, but in trying to secure their future, this family cannot escape the past, and in striving so hard to free themselves from it, van Hove’s absorbing revival only brings a terrible reckoning.
Runs until 7 March 2026
