All My Sons
by
Arthur Miller
Apollo
Theatre W1
Love Thy
Neighbour
Two
plays here - one a masterpiece from a time when young men were reaping
the benefits of the GI Bill in the US and there was some aspiration to a
Brave New World. The other (a preview performance), set in the 1950s and 2009,
has, well, interesting moments and might make a good movie, given some
thinning down. Guess which is which ;)
Firstly
Clybourne Park in preview.
Two
of the male roles in Clybourne Park almost have a powerful resonance but the
rest lacks the coherence and intriguing detective story feel of The Pain and
The Itch, Bruce Norris’s last play for The Royal Court which did have two men
firmly at the centre of the action.
Maybe
Clybourne Park, directed by Dominic Cooke, was meant to be a first act of
1950s sitcom writ dark with the second buying into the harsher world of
stand-up with supposedly beyond-the-pale material on race but, if so, this
didn’t work for TLT. There just wasn’t enough of a story.
There
were glimpses of a more mature play with Russ (Steffan Rhodri), a father
enduring after his soldier son’s apparent suicide, and Albert (Lucien Msmati),
the husband of the family’s black maid servant (Lorna Brown). But the women’s
dialogue is weak and the second-act self-conscious bickering of all the
characters felt interchangeable, despite the racial references.
The
American (or Canadian?) lady next to me told me she was bored and TLT
found it difficult to care about any of the characters or their opinions. The
attempt to telescope the past back into the present with mother /Bev
(Sophie Thompson) and son Kenneth (Michael Goldsmith) in a final scene
seemed a clumsy, last-ditch attempt to manipulate the play into the pathos and
irony it lacked.
Ghosts
of the past also haunt All My Sons, written in 1947, a family drama but
fault lines of money, family, community, politics, state responsibility
and war are also implicit.
An
airplane manufacturer is blamed and jailed for shipping out, during the Second
World War, “defectives” (that is defective mechanical parts not people but
ambiguity of dialogue gives the play a deeper resonance). Consequence: the
death of pilots in an industry as self-regulating as any pre-war Wall Street
Crash financial sector.
Meanwhile
the man’s business partner and neighbour Joe Keller (David Suchet) escapes scot free. His family,
albeit minus a dead war hero son, lives on in the same house ostensibly
respected even after the very dubious court case. A pillar of the community, he
joshes, with bankrupt morality, with a local kid (Ted Allpress) about
setting up the latter up as an informal policeman to oversee the local
community (1947 was also the year Joe McCarthy was elected to the Senate).
And
behind everything lies two properties, the surviving business partner’s family
home and the unseen house next door where the local doctor (Steven Elder),
whilst bemoaning not getting work in lucrative medical research, and his
nurse wife (Claire Hackett) have moved in smoothly filling the void left
by the shamed family of the jailed manufacturer.
Unlike
the talky and losing-the-thread Clybourne Park (which apparently was a hit when
it opened in the US), All My Sons, directed here by Howard Davies,
retains its clarity as a family drama but, by the unravelling of the
second half, there are hints of the disintegration and suicidal infighting
within the "family" of America’s post-war left as much as a
critique of the American Dream.
This
is a compelling, many-layered play with wonderful central performances
including Zoë Wannamker as wife Kate
Keller where the arguments are part of the action, growing out of
character, gripping throughout with, importantly, the power to surprise with
the logic of its twists and turns.
Call
me old-fashioned but TLT can only give a scraping-through to amber light to
Clybourne Park for an intriguing idea while it's a bright green light to All My
Sons.
Postscript
Apparently
Clybourne Park is a response to Raisin in the Sun
(1959) by Lorraine Hansberry, the first play by a black woman and with a black
director to be produced on Broadway. Incidentally, Ms Hansberry met her husband
Robert Nemiroff on a picket line and they spent the night before their wedding
protesting against the execution of the Rosenbergs.
TLT
has never seen and didn't know the plot of Raisin in the Sun before attending
Clybourne Park but it was based on the true story of Ms Hansberry's parents
fighting a colour bar in a court case involving a house and housing association
in Chicago in 1937.
The
house in question is now apparently (according to Wikipedia) being considered
for status as a listed building. Clybourne Park should stand alone as a play,
but it strikes TLT knowing the plot of the earlier play may be an essential
when seeing this new piece.