All My Sons, Apollo Theatre, London

The grass is green in Howard Davies’ magnificent revival of All My Sons, but the ice is thin. Arthur Miller’s early play never moves from the backyard of the Keller household, realised in beautiful leafy detail on William Dudley’s set, but into that cosy enclave of American suburbia reaches the long arm of guilt. The play observes the classical unities of time, space and action: it starts on a sunny Sunday morning with casual chit-chat about toasters; it ends, less than 24 hours later, in extremis, with blazing recriminations, remorse and suicide.

It is, remarkably, both dated and timeless. It can seem didactic, contrived in places and melodramatic towards the end. It would be subtler and more complex if it drew you closer to Joe Keller, the flawed protagonist at its heart. But in the hands of Davies and his exemplary cast, none of these flaws seems to matter much. They bring out the enduring qualities of the play: Miller’s achievement in fusing tragedy and ordinary life, his sympathetic depiction of troubled human beings caught up in the mill of history and his powerful plea to conscience. Like J.B. Priestley, Miller brings a charge of collective responsibility close to home, this time literally to an American backyard.

And while the question of who survives, how and why, might have particular sting for a 1940s audience, the central issue of arms manufacture still hits home today. A play that examines the moral implications of sending young men to fight ill-equipped makes queasy watching for a contemporary audience.

The year is 1946. The Kellers have suffered in the war: their older son is missing, presumed dead by everybody except Kate, his mother. Her reluctance to let him go is maternal, but deep down is also tied to her knowledge that his father, Joe, is responsible for making faulty engine parts that sent 21 pilots to their deaths. Joe let his business partner go to jail for the offence. When cornered, he argues that he did so for his family, to keep the business alive. But his remaining son, Chris (an outstanding Stephen Campbell Moore) is sickened by this argument: where Joe sees survival, Chris sees abdication of a greater moral responsibility.

Davies’ precisely calibrated production is full of deftly drawn performances. At the centre is David Suchet, tremendous as Joe. He begins full of easy bonhomie, with the occasional glint of flint. By the end, brought to book, he looks a full decade older and seems to have shrunk inside his clothes. Zoë Wanamaker matches him, as Kate, with a painful study in guilt and grief. They both suggest that the final showdown is both an ordeal and a relief: the pretence is finally over. (

Tel 0844 579 1971