Theatre
Theatre review: All My Sons
Sally Field is outstanding in the production of Arthur Miller's classic play
May 2, 2019 12:27
By, John Nathan
2 min read
Sally Field is outstanding in the production of Arthur Miller's classic play
May 2, 2019 12:27ByJohn Nathan, John Nathan
The problem with Arthur Miller is that every good production of his best plays leaves you with the sense that you seen have seen something definitive. And, by definition, that cannot be right.
The late Howard Davies’s 2001 National Theatre production of Miller’s 1947 play, All My Sons, a deconstruction of the American family, had a poleaxing potency with Julie Walters in the role of Kate Keller, the matriarch who lives in denial about the death of her pilot son who went missing in the war.
But then with the production partially recast with a more subtle Laurie Metcalf as Kate, you felt a new benchmark had been set. And even though I’ve never quite been able to count myself as one of Zoe Wanamaker’s greatest admirers, in the more recent West End production (directed by Davies again) with David Suchet as her factory-owning husband Joe, I can still see Wanamaker’s thousand-yard stare as her Kate finally sees there is no place left to hide from the truth. That felt pretty devastating, too.
But now here comes double Oscar winner Sally Field in her London stage debut and even though I have learnt not to describe Jeremy Herrin’s fine production as definitive, it is hard to imagine that a performance will ever trump Field’s.
A couple of gripes: Herrin over-eggs irony about America’s misplaced pride in its flag with projections of a giant, fluttering Stars and Stripes. And designer Max Jones’s set of the Keller’s comfortable family home looks more like a bungalow than the spoils made from manufacturing engines during the war.
So you don’t quite get a sense of the scale of the Keller fortune, or the financial benefit Bill Pullman’s homespun Joe reaped while all his and America’s sons fought overseas. But the story, taking place in the Keller’s garden, slowly reveals a scandal that, unlike Kate’s missing son, refuses to die.
We never see the man who unfairly took the wrap for shipping the faulty engines from Joe’s factory that resulted in the deaths of 21 pilots. But the cold contempt displayed by his daughter Ann (Jenna Coleman) every time he is mentioned is a constant reminder of the price he paid for the injustice.
Pullman’s affable Joe, meanwhile, terrifically conveys the way the guilty construct innocent versions of themselves that they can live with. And it is here that Herrin’s production reveals a truth about the Kellers. Whereas, normally, Kate’s insistence that her dead son will one day return is usually the play’s tragic example of living a life of denial, here the flashes of aggression with which Field’s normally mild-mannered matriarch defends her belief, is early proof that she knows the truth about her husband’s guilt better than he does.
Colin Morgan as the surviving heir to Joe’s factory fortune superbly morphs from adoration to desolate disgust for his father. Kayla Meikle as the knowing neighbour is also outstanding. But Field, who is in total command of the tiniest nuance and the most terrifying outburst, is simply brilliant.