All My Sons by Ivo van Hove expands on the UK’s special relationship with Arthur Miller stage

TThe long love affair between British theater and Arthur Miller continues. This week sees the beginning of previews for Ivo van Hove’s production of Miller’s first Broadway hit, “All My Sons,” which has seen six major revivals over the past five decades. In fact, you could argue that Miller is more honored here than at home. At his death, the Times Literary Supplement said: “He was mourned in England as a revered contemporary, and in America as a figure of a bygone age.”

Why this division? One answer offered by All My Sons is that Miller analyzed the American psyche while steeped in European traditions. It is difficult to discuss this particular play without revealing the plot. However, it is no secret that it rests on the unproven accusation that Joe Keller, as a wartime aircraft engine builder, allowed defective cylinder heads to be sent to the Air Force knowing they could endanger lives.

This immediately makes one think of Ibsen. In a pillar of society, rarely seen these days, a wealthy shipowner allows his obnoxious brother-in-law to go to sea in a corrupt ship only to discover that his son is also on board. In his excellent book on Miller’s plays, Christopher Bigsby also refers to The Wild Duck and sees in Joe’s son, Chris, the embodiment of the flawed ideal compared to Ibsen’s Gregers Werle. But Bigsby hit the nail on the head when he said that Miller, just like Ibsen, mixes tragedy and comedy and shows the present forever haunted by the past.

While Miller is clearly indebted to Ibsen, he is also a profoundly American writer. I once dared to ask him, during a public interview about his autobiography, Timebends, whether he had ever considered moving to Europe because in his homeland he had suffered political persecution and critical hostility. I remember Miller seemed a bit horrified by the idea and emphasized his commitment to his home country.

No American critic has written about this better than Harold Clurman who, in his review of the original production of All My Sons in 1947, distinguished vividly between the play’s substance and its meaning, seeing in Miller “a moral gift with a passionate insistence that resembles that of the New England preacher who fashioned our first American oratory.”

Since All My Sons are Ibsenists and Americans, how can one represent this? Looking at three previous works, I was struck by their social realism and powerful performances. Michael Blackmore’s 1981 production, also at Wyndham, emphasized the backyard play’s folksy humor and was expertly played, with Colin Blakely giving the air a muscular, stocky air and Rosemary Harris investing his wife, Kate, in the look of a budding martyr.

Howard Davies, who first directed the play at the National Theater in 2000, staged a better production in the West End in 2010 with David Suchet, as Blakely, emphasizing Joe’s backyard friendship and Zoe Wanamaker subtly suggesting that Kate was as steeped in pretense as her husband.

More recently, in 2019, it was directed by Jeremy Herren at the Old Vic with two American actors in the lead: Bill Pullman as the fiercely self-righteous Joe, and Sally Field, wrapping herself in her wool jacket as if it were a protective armour, as the gorgeous Kate.

So what can we expect from Van Hove? Given that the Young Vic’s famous 2014 revival of A View from the Bridge dispensed with the realism of Red Hook to present the play in a stark black box, I doubt we’ll ever get an Ohio backyard that looks like the cover of a Norman Rockwell magazine. With Bryan Cranston as Jo, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Papa Essiedu as Kate and Chris, we can also expect a new look at the Keller family. But, however it turns out, I hope the production recognizes Miller as a deeply American moralist partial to the European past, from Aeschylus to Ibsen.