This play has all the stars of a dream cast align for Arthur Miller’s towering tragedy. Miller’s 1946 play perfects the art of doing less for more-buck effect, performed at the same West End venue that hosted A View from the Bridge. Director Ivo van Hove let the cast not just inhabit their parts but somehow become them as if by magic. They articulate the devastating truths about the corruptions of the American Dream and the toxic inheritance handed down from fathers to sons.
The relevance to today is prescient. A line can be drawn from the play’s themes of selling faulty equipment to the government and the unaccountability of corrupt capitalists and patriarchs to Trumpian facts and delusions, Grenfell and the Covid-era PPE scandal.
The story follows wealthy industrialist Joe Keller (Bryan Cranston) who spends time in jail for knowingly supplying defective aircraft cylinder heads to the army during the Second World War, leading to the death of 21 U.S pilots, but has since cleared his name by blaming his business partner Steve Deever. War has touched this family nevertheless. His wife, Kate ( Marianne Jean- Baptist), is waiting for their son Larry to return, several years on. Their other son, Chris ( Paape Essiedu), is getting ready to propose to Larry’s fiancé, Ann (Hayley Squires), the daughter of Joe’s failed partner. Ingenious tweaks render it a radically different experience.
This play runs through without an interval, at a pace reminiscent of Ancient Greek theatre, the play drawing on Sophoclean examination of the family, what it means for a son to inherit a father’s crimes, the production skilfully laying out the psychology of blame, guilt and complicity in an incredible full-bodied and clarifying way. This play is richly endowed with symbolism and deep lasting pedigree.
Director Ivo van Hove is familiar with stagecraft getting his career-making accolades working with Cranston on Network, landing the actor both Olivier and Tony awards- extremely high bars.
Its a phenomenal piece of theatre admirably served by Jan Versweyveld’s design, costume design by An D’huys, dramaturgy by Ola Animashawun and sound by Tom Gibbons. The ensemble impart uniform excellence, milking every ounce of self-delusion, madness and quashed idealism from the text, deriving surprising sweetness from its ill-fated love story.
The play’s increasing relevance applies to today, where business practices continue to dominate political and social mores and unreservedly in the room given to the actors interpretations. Van Hove and Versweyveld share a sensibility that embraces expressive minimalism with a penchant for showmanship and settings. Cranston’s Joe Keller dominates the opening scenes as he holds court to any listening neighbours and any kid who strays onto his yard. He’s amicable, clownish, even slightly doddery old fella, whose total persona is based on making people happy. Chief among these people is his son Chris (Paape Essiedu) who works at his father’s manufacturing business but has an idealistic bent to forge his own path but doesn’t dare to. Cranston and Essiedu convey a strong bond, hugging, playful-fighting, joshing but their physicality will play out at the play’s end to devastatingly different outcome.
Chris is uneasy about the effects of losing fellow friends in the war and the life plotted out for him by his father. His brother, Larry went missing in action, while Joe, Chris and Larry’s girlfriend Ann Deever (Hailey Squires) accept his death while his mother, Kate, does not, insisting that Harry will return, keeping her husband and surviving son in a constant limbo, tiptoeing around her feelings. And here lies the power of this production, founded by the cast whose performances exert such pivotal power. The frailty and fragility of this society is deep rooted as are the self-deceptions and lies that sound the play’s tragedy. Essiedu is charismatic from the moment he steps onto the stage. So are Jean-baptist and Cranston along with Squires’s desperate Ann. Tom Glyn-Carney brings gravitas as Ann’s angry brother who is also seduced into collusion with Keller’s lies.
No actor steals the show, each raising the power of the ensemble as a whole. The alchemy dazzles, with Van Hove’s visual intensity and Miller’s timeless prose. It just doesn’t get better,
