With its plot driven by a military-industrial complex which puts productivity and economics ahead of human lives, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, a post-war family drama and deconstruction of the American Dream, remains hugely relevant almost 80 years after its Broadway premiere, and this West End revival feels particularly timely.
In a small town in Ohio, Joe Keller lives with his wife Kate, and son Chris. Joe’s other son, Larry, disappeared during the Second World War, and although it has been several years, Kate insists that he is still alive and will return. This poses a problem for Chris, who is in love with Larry’s sweetheart Ann, who he intends to marry.
It gradually emerges that Annie’s father, Joe’s former business partner, is serving time in prison. He knowingly supplied defective engine parts to the military, resulting in 21 young pilots crashing their aircraft. Joe was implicated in the crime but was exonerated. Over the course of three acts, tensions and secrets boil over.
From the moment the curtain rises, it’s clear this production is a bold reimagining. A play set in an Ohio back yard, past productions have lavishly recreated porches, white picket fences, and whole flowerbeds on stage.
Under Jan Versweyveld’s design, however, the action plays out on an abstract, almost Beckettian set. A brown brick backdrop with a single black doorway centre stage to represent the house’s back door, and a backlit circular window high above the stage. Following a dramatic stormy prologue, an enormous fallen tree lies across the stage; characters climb over it, sit on it, and on one occasion even take a chainsaw to it.
The tree was planted as a memorial to the Kellers’ son Larry, listed as Missing In Action for several years. The symbolism of it being blown down is commented upon by characters throughout the play, but the four foot sapling described in Miller’s text now dominates the whole stage, just as Larry’s disappearance dominates the plot.
The timeless design extends to An D’Huys’s costume design, with Kate, Chris, and Annie all dressed in bold primary colours, while Joe favours a plain shirt and baseball cap.
The cast is led by Bryan Cranston as Joe Keller. Cranston is magnetic as the patriarch who slowly transforms from a jolly avuncular figure, playing grandfather to the whole neighbourhood, and into a far more sinister, abrasive, haunted man. Audiences have of course seen him play family figures with a dark side before, but in playing Joe he is equally convincing as a family man and as an utterly ruthless businessman.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Joe’s wife Kate, and brings an intense moral certainty to a character that in lesser hands could be dismissed as hysterical for much of the play. Paapa Essiedu takes on the role of their son Chris, and delivers a scorching performance that should surely put him in the running for every award going. From his easy charm in early lines like “I like to keep abreast of my ignorance” to his explosive rage towards the end of Act III, Essiedu carried the audience with him throughout the show.
The three leads are surrounded by a top-notch ensemble, including Hayley Squires as a mercurial Ann, torn between her love for Chris and her palpable concern for her brother, Tom Glynn-Carney’s manic George Deever. The neighbourhood characters Dr Jim Bayliss (Richard Hansell), Sue Bayliss (Cath Whitefield), Frank Lubey (Zach Wyatt) and Lydia Lubey (Aliyah Odoffin), all create compelling and plausible, yet faintly surreal, characters. They wander on full of their own intense preoccupations, and often give the family drama a faintly dreamlike tone.
The neighbours’ appearances often serve to break the building tension which builds as the play progresses and which, due to Director Ivo Van Hove’s bold decision not to include an interval, gains a terrible momentum.
The atmosphere is maintained by Versweyveld’s shifting lighting design which adds to the dreamlike feel of much of the show, but also heightens the drama alongside the quietly pulsating score from Tom Gibbons’s sound design.
Exploding a family and deconstructing the American Dream at once, this is a vibrant production of an essential play, with a top-notch cast coming together to produce an unmissable two hours of drama.
All My Sons runs at Wyndham’s Theatre until 7 March 2026.
Book tickets now at wyndhamstheatre.co.uk
Words by Andrew Lawston
Photos by Jan Versweyveld
