The last time Bryan Cranston teamed up with Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove – for “Network” at the National Theatre, then Broadway – it bagged the “Breaking Bad” star Olivier and Tony awards for best actor. “Only a fool would bet against a repeat triumph now,” said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper. I have never seen a better production of “All My Sons”, Arthur Miller’s 1947 classic about a toxic filial inheritance, and the rotten heart of the American dream. In this stunning new production, playing at just over two hours without an interval, the drama assumes the “grim yet towering momentum, inexorability and universality of a Greek tragedy”. Cranston, as Joe Keller, gives a “magnificent performance of craggy, rugged resilience tempered with affability”.
Cranston and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, playing his wife Kate, are “pitch perfect” as a couple “shutting out unbearable wartime truths”, said Nick Curtis in The London Standard. Their son, Larry, a pilot, has been missing in action for three years, while Joe’s business partner has been convicted of supplying defective equipment that cost pilots’ lives. Hayley Squires lends a “quiet gravitas” to Ann, Larry’s former girlfriend. But for all the first-rate acting on show, the performance “you walk out talking about” is that of Paapa Essiedu as the Kellers’ surviving son Chris, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. His “ascent from affable shrugs to righteous rants is plausible, compelling, freshly minted”.
It’s rare to see a group of actors “this brilliant gel so completely”, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. And the symbolist sparseness of Jan Versweyveld’s set design “drives the production further into the realm of the epic and timeless”. An old felled tree lies across the stage in the opening scene, while the Kellers’ house has a strange circular window that also transforms into something more elemental – variously the Sun and the Moon. There is “so much alchemy” in this dazzling production. “Every scene is strong, no actor stealing the show, each raising the power of the ensemble as a whole.”
Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2. Until 7 March
Ivo van Hove’s production of Arthur Miller’s classic play assumes the ‘grim yet towering momentum’ of a Greek tragedy
