“A man can’t be a Jesus in this world,” pleads the embattled wheeler-dealer Joe Keller in Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.” Joe sold dud helicopter parts to the U.S. military during World War II, resulting in the deaths of many pilots, and left his innocent business partner to take the rap. Rumbled at last, he begs his idealistic son, Chris, not to despise him: He was only doing the best for his family, and besides, isn’t most wealth ill-gotten?
Joe’s rationalizations are futile and self-serving — but in a deeper sense, they are truthful. Miller’s play premiered in 1947, and its indictment of dog-eat-dog capitalism has resonated ever since.
In a very fine revival of “All My Sons” — directed by Ivo van Hove and running at Wyndham’s Theater in London through March 7 — Miller’s tragic protagonist is played by Bryan Cranston, who knows a thing or two about morally compromised antiheroes, having played the meth-dealing schoolteacher Walter White in “Breaking Bad.” When we first meet him, Cranston’s Joe is a suburban Everyman holding court in his Ohio front yard, a folded newspaper jutting from his back pocket. A slight stiltedness in his bonhomie is the only hint of underlying turmoil. Two hours later, he is dead by his own hand.
Cranston gives a deftly modulated performance, passing through a gamut of demeanors as the truth comes to light: head-in-sand denial, anxious prevarication, defensive affront and, finally, crushing, suicidal despair. It’s all the more moving because he is not unlikable in his doting affection for his son and his disarming, Columbo-esque mannerisms.
He’s a pure cynic, for better and for worse, and in the magnificent Paapa Essiedu, who plays Chris, he has the perfect foil. As Chris, Essiedu exudes boyish, naïve decency — he’s a softie, but with inner strength. There’s a plaintive tenderness in Essiedu’s delivery — almost a catch in the throat — that lends a heart-rending poignancy to his reproaches. He conveys, with terrible conviction, the anguish of being let down by someone you once looked up to.
Chris hopes to marry Ann (Hayley Squires), the daughter of the imprisoned fall guy and the onetime sweetheart of Chris’s brother, Larry, who has been missing since the war and is presumed dead by everyone except their mother, Kate. Played with bristling bluntness by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, she clings neurotically to the status quo ante; the fragile edifice of the Kellers’ respectability is held together by her forceful obliviousness.
Cracks appear when Ann’s lawyer brother George (Tom Glynn-Carney) flies in from New York to spill the beans on Joe’s wrongdoing, and when Larry’s fate is revealed — suicide, prompted by shame at his father’s actions — Joe’s disgrace is complete.
Jan Versweyveld’s set is bare except for the carcass and scattered leaves of a large apple tree, felled by a portentous storm that opens the production. Light emanates from a circular aperture in the sand-colored back wall of the stage — first a deep orange, then a neon white, evoking the sun and the moon. During the fraught climactic scenes, it turns a sludgy, greenish blue.
The dusty visual palette, allusively suggestive of the Midwestern setting, is echoed in the earthy tones of An D’Huys’s costumes. The exception is George, who rocks up in a hoodie and a beanie, looking as if he’d wandered in from a different play. The streetwear getup makes a freighted exchange about George’s “hat,” which was given to him by his father, feel slightly ridiculous — but otherwise the production is pleasing on the eye.
Van Hove’s signature style, which weds minimalist visuals with maximum psychological intensity, has yielded mixed results recently. His “All About Eve” rang hollow, and his musical reimagining of John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night” was a mess. But when it comes to Arthur Miller, van Hove is in his element. While “All My Sons” is not quite as exquisitely taut as his Oliver- and Tony-garlanded 2015 production of Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” it is still one of the most emotionally powerful productions on the London stage this year.
There is something in Miller’s material that suits van Hove’s foreboding aesthetic: the sense of destiny making its inexorable claim; the doomed protagonist gradually losing his grip on events. That’s plenty of drama already, and the director adds a near-constant thrum of ominous orchestral music to further ramp up the menace. Tragedy is a cruel business, and if van Hove can seem like a child picking the wings off a fly and watching it squirm, that’s because he’s doing it right.
All My Sons Through March 7 at Wyndham’s Theater in London; wyndhamstheatre.co.uk.
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