Arthur Miller often said that if All My Sons had not been a success he would have given up writing and ‘found some other line of work.’  Theatregoers probably feel that they owe this play a great deal, therefore; and in a way they do.  But modern audiences, whatever their admiration for Miller, are privileged to approach this 1947 work from the vantage of 2010.  They can see what this play’s original audience could not: that All My Sons, so much better than so much else, was by no means the best this playwright could do.  This is something that appears to have been forgotten by even the most muted reviews of the Apollo Theatre’s current production of All My Sons, very nearly all of them five-star.  A typical example calls it ‘a play of extraordinary power and emotional depth,’ an appellation whose accuracy, I would argue, depends on one’s definition of ‘extraordinary.’

Undoubtedly, Howard Davies’s company is composed of serious actors who have taken themselves and their text very seriously.  They have even striven for contemporaneity – witness David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker’s appearance on the Andrew Marr show to talk about this play’s relevance to the present day, or the remarks on a certain BBC blog (though they had me squirming) about ‘Arthur Miller’s Big Society’.  This is a play with the ingredients of brilliance and the cast and crew know it, but – with a few notable exceptions (Stephen Campbell Moore’s naturalistic tour de force of a performance among them) – those participating in this production lack the sense of perspective to make it extraordinary.

All My Sons is set entirely in the backyard of the Keller family, whose ageing patriarch, Joe, prospered by selling equipment to the armed forces during World War II.  Larry, one of Joe and his wife Kate’s two sons, did not make it back from the war, and as the play opens he has been missing in action for three years.  Everyone but Kate, it appears, is certain Larry has died – indeed, his erstwhile fiancée Annie has come to visit in order to marry the other Keller son, Chris – but we slowly learn that all kinds of other family secrets are tied up with the possibility of Larry’s having survived. 

Something important about All My Sons, and Arthur Miller’s plays more broadly, is the application to ‘ordinary’ people and events of the conventions of classical tragedy.  To have its proper effect, as the most successful productions of Miller plays have shown, such formal artificiality has to be offset by authenticity of mood.  The latter is much harder to create, and Davies’s All My Sons does not manage to create it: this failure is partly the fault of the actors – the script’s frequent flashes of wisdom sometimes suffer from the portentousness with which they are uttered, by Suchet and Wanamaker in particular – but a measure of the blame must be laid at Miller’s door; as when, at the end of the play, at least one deus ex machina is felt to fall on us like an enormous clanger.

As a playwright Arthur Miller was prescriptive, a real Barthesian Author-God: his stage directions and instructions are highly detailed, which means that productions of his plays tend not to vary much.  For the most part, this works superlatively well.  But All My Sons was written when Miller was only on the cusp of greatness (or the cusp of the cusp – Death of a Salesman was written directly afterwards) yet here it is treated, erroneously, as if in 1947 the playwright had no heights left to scale. 

As the reason why a twentieth-century literary titan did not give up writing plays, All My Sons is extremely significant; but the current run is weakened by an at once slavish and self-important interpretation.  This is a good play that, as is happily standard in Miller, has a lot to tell, I would even say teach, us – but it does that writer’s astonishing oeuvre a disservice to call this incarnation of All My Sons extraordinary.

posted by Roberta