GRIEF, GUILT, CONSCIENCE
A great bright disc of moon overhangs the old tree in the storm, as it falls in the tumult of sound that could be war. It’s 1948: Arthur Miller’s America scarred by the losses of war. Sometimes the big will be the sun over the Kellers’ morning garden where bluff old Joe teases the neighbour’s kid , joshes with his son Chris, and winces at the flakey neighbour . The latter is doing a “horoscope” requested by Joe’s wife to see whether the day their pilot son Larry disappeared off the China coast was a “fortunate” one: she believes he will reappear. Because she says “certain things can never happen. Things cannot be”. As Chris observes, her unresolved limbo of grief strands the family, “like a railroad station waiting for a train that never comes in. It matters, because he has invited Annie, his brother’s old girlfriend, and wants to marry her It also matters that Annie’s father, former partner in Joe’s engineering business, is still in prison for supplying cylinder-heads, faulty but disguised, to the USAF and 21 pilots died. Joe was exonerated, and over them all hangs the possibility that he shouldn’t have been.
It’s a fierce play, straightforwardly devastating, the situation in it based on true events. The gradual steps to its conclusion subtly written, its message immense: about conscience and commerce, grief and responsibility and the human capacity to varnish over terrible truths and see them emerge worse. Chris, himself a soldier, speaks for the total sacrifice of responsbility to fellows – guys who “killed themselves for each other.” That his father fell short of that sober duty to all humanity, boasting that Larry never flew one of the afflicted P40 jets, is an unease he feels even as, sweetly, he and Annie declare themselves. How much the wife, KAte Keller, knows we cannot be too simply told.
I had some fears about the production, having been properly moved to tears six years ago by Jeremy Herrin’s production, because Ivo Van Hove, as a director, either gives you something wonderful or something downright annoying, and I feared trusting him with Miller’s fierce moral straightness. But his View from the Bridge was brilliant, and here he plays it straight, only two brief visual coups-de-theatre, the first of which – the entry of Annie’s brother George – knocks you sideways. Bryan Cranston is wonderful casting as Joe : the joshing, amiable leading-citizen, boss at the big plant, still doing well with washing-machine bits, self-persuaded in his guiltlessness about the day poor nervous Steve sent off the lethal faulty parts. Yet in Miller’s diabolically brilliant text, he also emits such a man’s ability to project guilt on another: pure politician. His final disintegration is horrifying; but no more so than the rage of Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Kate when she learns the full truth about Larry, or the explosion of Paapa Essiedu’s Chris – a remarkable performance throughout – with the line that howls down all the decades. the great cry that we should all be “Be Better!”.
There were some silent, unsteady steps among the audience as we left. This play can do it, and Van Hove treated it with the respect it should have for all time.
delfontmackintosh.co.uk to 7 march
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