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The British theatre’s long love affair with Arthur Miller continues. This week sees the start of previews for Ivo van Hove’s production of Miller’s first Broadway hit, All My Sons, which has had half a dozen major revivals over the past five decades. Indeed, you could argue that Miller is more honoured here than at home. On his death it was said in the Times Literary Supplement: “He was mourned in England as a revered contemporary, in America as a figure from a bygone age.”
Why this division? One answer, supplied by All My Sons, is that Miller analysed the American psyche while being steeped in European tradition. It is difficult to discuss this particular play without giving away the plot. It is, however, an open secret that it hinges on the unproven accusation that Joe Keller, as a wartime manufacturer of aircraft engines, allowed faulty cylinder heads to be dispatched to the air force knowing they could endanger life.
Immediately this makes one think of Ibsen. In The Pillars of Society, rarely seen these days, a wealthy shipowner allows his detested brother-in-law to go to sea in a rotten vessel only to discover that his own son is also on board. In his brilliant book on Miller’s plays, Christopher Bigsby also references The Wild Duck and sees in Joe’s son, Chris, an embodiment of the flawed idealist comparable to Ibsen’s Gregers Werle. But Bigsby hits the nail on the head when he says that Miller, exactly like Ibsen, blends the tragic and the comic and shows the present for ever haunted by the past.
While Miller is clearly indebted to Ibsen, he is also a profoundly American writer. I once had the temerity to ask him, in the course of a public interview about his autobiography, Timebends, whether he had ever considered relocating to Europe since at home he had endured political persecution and critical hostility. I remember Miller looking faintly aghast at the idea and stressing his commitment to his native land.
No American critic has written better about this than Harold Clurman who, in his review of the original 1947 production of All My Sons, made a vital distinction between a play’s material and its meaning, and saw in Miller “a moral talent with a passionate persistence that resembles that of the New England preacher who fashioned our first American rhetoric”.
Given that All My Sons is Ibsenite and American, how does one stage it? Looking back at three past productions, I am struck by their social realism and strong performances. Michael Blakemore’s 1981 production, also at Wyndham’s, stressed the play’s folksy back-yard humour and was expertly played, with Colin Blakely lending Joe a stocky muscularity and Rosemary Harris investing his wife, Kate, with the look of a blooming martyr.
Howard Davies, who had first directed the play at the National in 2000, did an even better production in the West End in 2010 with David Suchet, like Blakely, stressing Joe’s back-yard bonhomie and Zoë Wanamaker subtly suggesting that Kate was as swathed in pretence as her husband.
More recently, in 2019, Jeremy Herrin directed it at the Old Vic with two American actors in the lead: Bill Pullman as a strenuously self-justifying Joe, and Sally Field, encasing herself in her cardigan as if it were a protective shield, as a superb Kate.
So what can we expect from Van Hove? Given that in his celebrated 2014 Young Vic revival of A View from the Bridge he dispensed with Red Hook realism to stage the play in a stark black box, I doubt we will get an Ohio back yard that looks as if it were a Norman Rockwell cover for an American magazine. With Bryan Cranston as Joe, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Paapa Essiedu as Kate and Chris, we can also expect a fresh take on the Keller family. But, however it turns out, I hope the production recognises that Miller is a deeply American moralist with a bias to the European past, from Aeschylus to Ibsen.
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All My Sons is at Wyndham’s theatre, London, 14 November to 7 March
