All My Sons review – Bryan Cranston delivers a devastating performance in Arthur Miller‘s masterpiece

In 2014 ivo van Hove’s Young Vic staging of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge drew comparisons to monumental Greek drama. lightning has struck twice with this grand, shuddering production of Miller’s 1946 play – it perfects the art of doing less for more effect and is performed at the same West End venue were its predecessor transferred.

Van Hove, known for giving the classics his own stamp, steps back here, it seems, letting the cast (and what a cast this is) not just inhabit thier parts but somehow become them as if by magic. They articulate the devastating truths in this play about the corruptions of the American dream and the toxic inheritance handed down from fathers to sons. How relevant these truths seem today: it is indeed as if Miller were speaking directly about now. A line can be drawn from the play’s themes of selling faulty equipment to government and the unaccountability of corrupt capitalist patriarchs to Trumpian facts and delusions, Grenfell and the Covid-era PPE scandal.

Yet the story is followed with fidelity to the original: wealthy industrialist Joe Keller (bryan Cranston) served time in jail for knowingly supplying defective aircraft cylinder heads to the army during the second world war, leading to the deaths of 21 US pilots, but has since cleared his name by blaming his business partner, Steve Deever. War has claimed its victims in this family nonetheless. His wife, Kate (Marianne jean-Baptiste), is waiting for their son, Larry, to return, several years on. Their other son, Chris (Paapa Essiedu), is getting ready to propose to larry’s fiancee, Ann (Hayley squires), the daughter of Joe’s jailed partner.