ALL MY SONS. To 7 October.
Liverpool
ALL MY SONS
by Arthur Miller
Liverpool Playhouse To 7 October 2006
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 5Oct 1.30pm, 7 Oct 2pm
Audio-described 5 Oct
BSL Signed 6 Oct
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
TICKETS: 0151 709 4776
www.everymanplayhouse.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 29 September
Social conscience and personal flaws in a well-acted production that could trust the play even more.
As Liverpool’s programme makes clear, the crime underlying Arthur Miller’s 1947 play had all-too-much reality in its day. Behind the garden in which everything is so apparently lovely for businessman Joe Keller, lie the deaths of American airmen killed when faulty parts crashed their planes during World War II. Postwar investigations were resulting in convictions for companies and individuals as Arthur Miller wrote All My Sons.
Keller (a sunnily beaming Michael Byrne) offloaded blame onto his business partner and neighbour. Keller, with his personal guilt and tragic realisation, is a criminal who's found his scapegoat in the very suburban haven where neighbours now live contented-seeming lives.
As neighbour Sue Bayliss points-out, everyone knows Joe’s crime, but they respect him for escaping its consequences. Suburban Middle America’s complicit; Sue herself shrugs Joe’s guilt off, more annoyed at his son Chris’s inconvenient idealism.
The play shows both Miller’s Ibsenite social leanings and his inclination towards tragedy. (In these, especially the first, he’s close to J B Priestley, whose Inspector is coincidentally calling with a similar message across at Mold). Gemma Bodinetz’s intelligent revival shows disturbance filtering through the friendly façade, first unconsciously in the flaringly bright red dress of the imprisoned man’s daughter Ann, then in the moodiness of her brother, fresh from hearing his imprisoned father’s story.
Running alongside this there’s Joe’s wife, unable to believe her other son Larry, “missing in action”, is dead. The hold the recent past has on these people is clearly worked out, Dearbhla Molloy’s Kate always one dimension away from the present, her smiles contrasting Joe’s in being withdrawn, her thoughts often unspoken.
Perhaps Molloy doesn’t suggest the ordinariness, the lack of intelligence she describes in her husband and herself. And the only reservation about Bodinetz’ revival is an over-schematic quality. So Joe’s change from sunniness to rage seems thematic rather than purely character-driven. Gideon Davey’s set’s similar, replacing the comfortable garden with scrubbed, sloping boards and hundreds of symbolic red-apples in the corners. Dozens more slowly descend at the conclusion; as if Miller couldn’t be relied on to end his own play without help.
Joe Keller: Michael Byrne
Chris Keller: Alexis Denisof
Dr Jim Bayliss: Laurence Kennedy
Sue Bayliss: Beverley Longhurst
Kate Keller: Dearbhla Molloy
Ann Deever: Alice Patten
Lydia Lubey: Emily Pithon
Frank Lubey: George Potts
George Deever: Tim Steed
Bert: Harry Machray/Oscar Reddrop
Director: Gemma Bodinetz
Designer: Gideon Davey
Lighting: Oliver Fenwick
Sound: John Leonard
Dialect coach: Judith Windsor
Fight director: Bret Yount
2006-10-02 15:53:55