All My Sons

by Arthur Miller

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 14 May 2019

Jeremy Herrin directs Bill Pullman as Joe Keller, Sally Field as his wife Kate, Colin Morgan as his son Chris and Jenna Coleman as Ann Deever, the daughter of Joe's disgraced foreman Steve and prospective wife of Chris in a Headlong co-production with the Old Vic of Arthur Miller's 1947 play about the corrosive effect of capitalism on small-town lives.

Joe, Kate and Chris live still in the suburban house where Chris and his brother Larry (now missing in action from the war, presumed dead by all except Kate) grew up. Ann and her mother and brother George (Oliver Johnstone) left the neighbouring house after Steve was convicted for sending faulty cylinders to the Air Force during the war, which caused the deaths of at least 21 pilots. Joe himself spent some time on jail, but was exonerated and released when the court accepted testimony that he was not involved in the deception.

Typically with Miller, there is more than meets the eye to this situation. Ann was engaged to Larry; now Chris wants to marry her and has invited her back from New York to settle the matter, even though it will cause considerable pain to his mother. Her arrival inevitably brings back painful memories, especially as her willingness to 'move on' can only cause further grief to Kate. But it is the arrival of George, her insecure brother now determined with his legal training to revisit the matter of the damaged consignment, which precipitates the real crisis and the revelations which put the whole matter in a ghastly perspective.

The play starts out innocuously enough with neighbourly visits on a Sunday morning, but one soon senses that the family is treading on egg-shells as Joe presents a folksy but somehow evasive geniality, Chris is eager but on edge, and Kate is relentlessly upbeat and apparently sweet, but determined at all costs to preserve her hopes that Larry is just missing. As the play progresses deeper issues of loyalty, honesty and determination to survive in a rapacious world of business are raised, and this runs the risk of heavy-handedness. Miller avoids this pitfall: we have to remain convinced that the people grappling with these intractable forces are just ordinary citizens caught in a trap, and in Joe's case barely able to articulate his point of view. Though Kate may use the claim that she and Joe are 'stupid people' with some cunning, it remains true that they are not educated, and both Bill Pullman and Sally Field create their characters with consummate skill.

Though the ethical crux of the play depends on what really happened during the war, and the denouement exposes the strategies of both Joe and kate to deal with it, the real power of this production lies in the extraordinary performance of Colin Morgan as Chris, a genuinely nice guy whose inspiring optimism is shattered by the revelations he has to face. He attacks the role with a gut-wrenching intensity which renders the final moments of the play truly heart-rending.