Powerful Arthur Miller revival featuring an outstanding performance from Sean Chapman.
Pat Ashworth – The Stage
As flawed protagonist Joe Keller, Sean Chapman is terrific. He totally convinces…
Nottingham Post
Chapman’s Joe is the anchor of the production.
Peter Kirwin – Exeunt magazine.
All My Sons review at Nottingham Playhouse – ‘an outstanding performance.’
The election of President Trump prompted Fiona Buffini to stage Arthur Miller’s ruthless dismantling of the American Dream.
It’s an intense and finely honed production with an inspired piece of casting in Sean Chapman as the self-made businessman, Joe Keller. He is so easy and comfortable in his skin, his clothes, his manner. If there were no dialogue, we’d still know that this was a man who had grafted and that his son, Chris (Cary Crankson), in his neatly pressed flannels, was a man who had not.
As the confrontations get fiercer and the truth comes out about Joe’s wartime guilt and the fate of the missing son, Chapman’s performance moves up gear after gear until the terrible end.
These are strongly drawn characters, particularly Joe’s wife, Kate, played with insight by Caroline Loncq. There’s a hard shell there that takes some breaking. Eva-Jane Willis gives a beautifully natural performance as Ann Deever, glamorous in scarlet and taking the initiative with the awkward Chris. The great topical theme of self–interest versus the common good doesn’t need any labouring. It’s evident in who these people are and how they interact.
It has its lighter moments in the lazy family banter, the comings-and-goings of the yard and the unseen life of the house – unlit until the final, dramatic moment. The storm-stricken and uprooted apple tree is the centrepiece of Dorrie Scott’s minimal set, jutting out at a right-angle on the sweep of an upward curve. Altogether a very fine piece of theatre.
Verdict
All My Sons ‘a fine production of an American classic.’ – Nottingham Post
The owner of a small Ohio engineering firm is living with a guilty half-secret. Seems that he and his business partner were in trouble during the recent war – this is 1947 – for turning out dud components for fighter planes. During the course of one summer’s day the whole truth is revealed, with disastrous consequences for him and his family.
But underlying the realism, All My Sons , Arthur Miller’s first success, is thematically and structurally, a Greek tragedy. It’s the final act of a drama with its origins in the past; and it involves the fall of a king, with, at the end, the promise of a new and better order to follow.
The set provides more than a hint of the sort of play this is going to be. A stereotypical middle-class American house is centre stage, painted white, with a front porch – all’s well and good. But at its side is an apple tree, half blown out of the ground.
As flawed protagonist Joe Keller, Sean Chapman is terrific. He total convinces as an unsophisticated and under-educated self-made man. But his pugnacious turns of phrase betray underlying unease and insecurity, which come increasingly nearer the surface as the play proceeds.
Cary Crankson, tall and rangy, is perfectly cast as his son Chris. A realist, who half-suspects the awful truth, he’s struggling to reconcile conflicting duties to those he loves, including his sweetheart Ann (Eva-Jane Willis in a fine performance). Kate Keller, unable to accept the finality of a bereavement and striving to hold the family together, is also beautifully played by Caroline Loncq.
The message is unmistakeable. The individual has clear moral obligations to his family, for sure. But these extend to the wider community, to the world at large.
This is a fine production of an American classic.
Devastating and dignified: Peter Kirwan reviews Fiona Buffini’s timely revival of Arthur Miller’s classic American drama.
Dorrie Scott’s set for Fiona Buffini’s new production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is dominated by two opposing structures. On the one side, the facade of a stable, clean house, built on the labours of Sean Chapman’s patriarch Joe and standing proud. On the other side, a sprawling apple tree planted for Joe and his wife Kate’s lost son, broken and falling into the back yard, its branches dangling into characters’ faces. The tree’s fall in the storm has pulled up the very stage itself; it curls upwards, revealing the mess of roots under the foundations. The image of a strong and stable family is undermined from the very start.
The choice of All My Sons was apparently inspired by Trump’s election, and the thematic links are there to be found, from a plot hinging on neglected responsibilities, to the constant search for someone to blame, to the hypocrisy of those who claim to be acting on behalf of the common person. But this production isn’t interested in big-P politics so much as in people, and Buffini’s subtle direction highlights the emotional stakes as a family are torn apart by the exposure of their world’s foundations.
Chapman’s Joe is the anchor of the production. With an East Coast clip and a blue-collar attitude, he dominates the backyard with a practised charm and a performance of his own ‘dumbness’. His neighbours question the route by which he came to his wealth, but in his own garden (which visitors have to enter via the porch of his house), he can relax away from prying eyes. When challenged, though, the steely businessman snaps into life, a simple commanding shout or, more sinisterly, a firm handshake and a “You know what I’m talking about” cowing those around him into submission. Disarming and disquieting, even as the scale of his earlier crimes is revealed, it seems impossible that anyone could shake his world.
But into the atmosphere of managed pleasantry that Joe has inculcated chime the voices of the play’s women in a series of outstanding performances. Particularly impressive is Shauna Shim’s Sue, who does wonders with a tiny part. A delightful conversation over a glass of grape juice with Eva-Jane Willis’s Ann turns into a barbed and then openly confrontational attack, as Sue orders Ann to take her fiancé far away and reveals her true feelings about Joe and Kate.
Willis herself carries a great deal of the play’s emotional weight: mourning Larry, lost in the war some years ago; getting engaged to his brother Chris (Cary Crankson); dealing with the imprisonment of her father, jailed for selling faulty plane parts that resulted in the deaths of several airmen; and being challenged throughout the play with the accusation that it was Joe, not her father, who was ultimately responsible. Willis balances perfectly Ann’s grief, honesty and self-determination, ensuring that she is never merely the victim of the emotional revelations but is always actively fighting for what she wants.
Caroline Loncq’s Kate is built up long before she first appears, with stories of her standing sobbing in the garden as the tree blew over in the preceding night. Her matter-of-fact practicality, easy wit and love for her family are endearing, but Loncq’s real achievement is in the delicacy with which she lets the cracks show. When she and Ann first meet, she implores Ann to agree with her that she is still waiting for the lost Larry; Ann’s gentle refusal, and her insistence that Larry is dead, are devastating. Loncq simultaneously does and doesn’t hear it, her world incapable of resolving itself to the idea; yet Ann’s kind but firm insistence on moving on is equally immovable. The tension between the two women, leading to Kate’s more erratic actions and outbursts later in the play, is knife-edge, the veneer of hospitality always forestalling histrionics.
The catalyst for the second half is the sudden – and quite brief – arrival of Ben Lee’s George, Ann’s brother, fresh from seeing his jailed father and hearing his side of the story. Lee, like the rest of the cast, is excellent, a nervous mess of angry, upset energy that he can’t direct properly. Watching Joe and Kate take him firmly in hand, with a combination of subtle displays of power, manipulative reminiscences, and gestures of acceptance within a family, is at times breathtaking; George’s energy drains away and leaves him looking physically smaller, at least until a throwaway remark rekindles his fire.
As the play rattles towards its final revelations and more emphasis is placed on Chris’ response to his father’s past actions, it loses some of its earlier subtlety, but by this time the sterling work of the first two acts has established all the necessary investment, and the final moments are shocking and perfectly fitting. The conflicts between business and patriotism, the self-made and the selfless, the conscience and the hand that feeds you, find a human face in this production, and the end result is both moving and dignified.
