Very few plays leave you physically struggling to walk out of the theatre. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, with super-human performances from David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker, is one of them.
Far from a society that was, to use JB Priestly’s words, fit for heroes, Miller finds the suburbs of post –Second World War America awash with bourgeoisie villainy. We watch utterly captivated as Joe Keller (Suchet), proud patriarch and factory owner who sold engine parts to the airforce during the war, disintegrates as the chickens come home to roost – a scandal involving faulty equipment that killed pilots rises up from the past like a bad stink, enveloping him and his family.
At his side, wife Kate (Wanamaker) refuses to believe their missing eldest son was killed during the war, against all the evidence, and passionately opposes their remaining son Chris’ (Stephen Campbell Moore) wish to marry his dead brothers’ wife Ann (Jemima Rooper), daughter of Joe’s ex-business associate, now incarcerated over the equipment scandal.
Director Howard Davies oils the gears of Miller’s ticking time bomb with exceptional deftness and the minutes just fly by. Suchet begins as the ultimate Dad, with a hands-on, rough-love touch and a joke for everyone, including the local schoolboys, whom he’s turned into a little ‘police force’.
When George, Ann’s brother, whose father languishes in prison, arrives throwing a fresh light on the case, and to prevent the marriage between Chris and Ann, the bomb explodes, turning the stage into an emotional inferno. As the truth of his culpability crystallises, and all possibility of pretense has evaporated, Suchet gives us an un-obstructed window onto the psyche of a desperate man – we start to see how Joe unsheathes that winning smile like a dagger when he tells the biggest lies, how he glosses, dominates, shouts, wheedles and jokes his way out of danger. Wanamaker’s turn is all the more subtle, but no less staggering. The sub-human groan that issues from her lips when the extent of the catastrophe is clear, is spine-chilling, the very music of pure grief.
What and whom will we sacrifice in the name of profit (or ‘nickel and dimes’ as Joe puts it)? Miller, like Priestly, unflinchingly demanded an answer from a recovering capitalist society whose economic muscle dealt European fascism the killer blow. Chirs, the living son, haunted by survivor’s guilt, is the sacrifice in this case. His idealism extends in all directors, marking him out as a symbol of America’s hope for the future. But it also blinds him to the grubby reality of his father’s character and this mistake proves fatal. It’s a wonderfully elegant enigma, played to the rafters by this scintillating and totally unmissable cast.