All My Sons
Apollo, booking to 2 October
Shrunk
Cock Tavern, until 12 June
It starts softly, in a dream of American contentment. A country house nestles in the lap of its lush and blossoming garden. The sun shines. Birds sing. Green foliage drips with the rain from last night’s storm and Joe Keller, a prosperous manufacturer in his early sixties, potters about the lawn reading the newspaper and cracking jokes with his neighbours. His son Chris has returned home and plans to marry Ann, the girl next door. But there’s a snag. In fact, there are two. Ann was engaged to Chris’s brother, a navy pilot who went missing in the war a couple of years earlier. And Ann’s father, along with Joe, was accused of selling faulty piston-heads to the US air force, a blunder that caused the deaths of 20 servicemen. In court both defendants blamed each other. The jury believed Joe. He was acquitted. Ann’s dad was sent to jail. The truth about this scandal is known only to Joe and to his grieving wife Kate, who won’t accept that her first son is no longer alive and refuses to sanction Ann’s marriage to Chris.
This is a complex set-up but it takes a certain brilliance — or, if you prefer, a genius — to combine the abstract issues of moral responsibility and the personal questions of grief and love in a vibrant harmony that’s amazingly clear, vivid and naturalistic all at once.
The play is a masterpiece on every level. It’s a romance, a thriller, a tragedy, a courtroom drama and a disquisition on human frailty and yet it unfolds with the unforced inevitability of a documentary. The final twist, which delivers a surprise of Sophoclean magnitude, turns it into one of the greatest whodunnits ever written. All My Sons, which was first staged in 1947, became an instant hit and established Arthur Miller’s name. At that time it was easily the best play written since the death of Chekhov. Miller makes Pirandello look like a pretentious fidget and Shaw like an overexcitable sixth-former.
This excellent production, directed by Howard Davies, is undoubtedly the best thing to reach the West End since Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth. Davies perfectly captures the strange and unnamable tensions that haunt the action from the very beginning. The leads are played by Zoë Wanamaker and David Suchet, who are best known for their TV roles as a dentist’s wife and a Belgian detective. Hardly the Himalayan heights of their profession, but both deliver performances worthy of Miller’s writing. Wanamaker’s Kate is a realistic portrait of stunned grief occasionally whipping itself into bursts of outlandish merriment. And Suchet captures Joe Keller’s sinuous, elaborate, self-deceiving charm. In the opening scene he pads about in baggy trousers and an open-necked shirt but when act two starts he appears transformed. Down the steps he trots, sleek and bejewelled in a double-breasted suit of silvery grey. It’s an amazing switch. The harmless old grandpa who tottered off to get ready for dinner emerges as a suave and icy executive capable of anything. The costume itself seems somehow steeped in dreadful portents.
I’m not sure what more I can say to recommend this show. When the curtain fell and the horrific conclusion had been played out, the actors emerged to take their bows but it seemed irrelevant, or even impertinent, to indulge in a rite so frivolous as applause. The woman beside me, a complete stranger, had been silently sobbing throughout the final act. She turned and whispered ‘Sorry’ to me with a smile of relief. Then up she sprang like the rest of us, soldiers at the command, for the standing ovation. An unforgettable experience.
And by way of light relief, a satire on psychoanalysis has opened at the Cock Tavern in Kilburn. Usually in psycho-satirico-comedy the shrink is much barmier than the patient. But here the Freud-fodder is more intriguing than your average bored Hampstead narcissist. She’s a genuine headcase. And she’s armed. Out comes the weapon and she forces her therapist at gunpoint to reveal the intimacies of his life. The show is notable for a fine central performance from Jack Klaff, as the terrorised analyst, and for the revealing light that it throws on the qualification process for wannabe shrinks. Extreme idlers only need apply. The ten-year training programme requires students to spend five hours a week lying on a couch daydreaming. Cushy number. And yet, as this show discloses, there are hordes of intelligent neurotics out there who would gladly denounce astrologers as swindlers but who would also credit the idling Buddhas of therapy with rare powers of divination and healing. My guess is that these tribes of loonies deserve each other.
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