All My Sons at Wyndham's Theatre

Initially I avoided All My Sons at Wyndham's Theatre for several reasons: I had seen twice before in recent memory (2016 and 2019) and I generally avoid the big star productions in the West End because of the high prices.

What changed my mind was very good reviews, a willingness to splash out on a major event  close to my birthday, and the appearance to two seats in an otherwise sold out production.

And so I paid £103.5 for seat Row A26 in the Royal Circle (the uppermost level). From there I could see almost all of the stage.

The set was nice and simple. The house was represented by a plain board across the back of the stage with a simple door and a round window above it; there were no other decorations or features. The only object in the garden was a fallen tree, which we saw fall at the very start of the show. This tree was were people sat. I like simple sets and this was a good one.

The story was what it was with lots of dialogue and little action. Plays like that have to be written well to work and clearly Arthur Miller knew what he was doing. I had remembered the gist of the story but there was a lot of detail that had slipped my mind and which I was glad to hear again.

Bryan Cranston had the star billing and played the patriarch superbly but the rest of the cast was so strong that his performance did not standout. All of the acting was superb.

The only part of the production that I am unsure about is the background music. I am not sure why it was there, it did nothing to enhance my enjoyment of the play but at least it was quiet enough to ignore most of the time.

This was a great play with a great cast and a pleasingly simple set. It was a perfect birthday treat.

A View From The Bridge at Rose Theatre

Not all Arthur Miller plays are classics but it is probably fair to say that are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955) are, and Wikipedia backs me up on this.

I had seen all but A View From The Bridge so was very pleased when it was announced that it was coming to Rose Theatre, particularly as their production of All My Sons was a triumph.

I picked a seat in my now favoured Circle, A24, which cost £35 with my Senior Citizen Concession. I like the view from Circle and that more than makes up for sitting amongst school children when at a matinee. That said, seat A24 is next to the aisle where a safety rail hinders the view slightly and I will avoid that seat in future (I am writing this now to remind me!).

The story was a fairly simple one, an American-Italian working class couple living with their orphaned niece (aged 17) are joined by two cousins who arrive from a poverty stricken Italy illegally to work on the docks. One of the cousins starts a relationship with the niece to which the over protective uncle is strongly against.

The story is the thread on which so many things hang that are revealed through the discussions between the five family members. Through these we learn more about life working on the docks, immigration into America at that time and the Italian community they belong too. We also learn about their histories and beliefs, for example the families left behind in Italy.

Central to all this is Eddie Carbone, the head of the family. It is his beliefs and passions that drive the story to its predictable conclusion. And we know it is predictable because a lawyer is used as a framing device and her intermittent narration explains that she has seen all this before. She may have done and while the outcome was predictable there were other outcomes that were equally possible.

Jonathan Slinger was perfect as Eddie and that was one of the main reasons the I loved the performance so much. The other cast members were good but this was Eddie's story.

Much of Eddie's character was the macho head of the family stuff but the play added some confusion over his relationship with his niece, he was accused of being jealous of his cousin at one point, and there were hints of homosexuality that were never resolved.

The other star of the show was the staging which made use of the shape and height of the unusual stage. It was a simple staging too with very few changes to the set, just a few chairs being moved around. I  have no idea why the swing is there in what was mostly a living room but it worked. Rose Theatre seems to like swings and so do I.

A View From The Bridge at Rose Theatre gave me everything that I could possibly want from a visit to a theatre, it was that good.

All My Sons at Rose Theatre was a triumph

I always use the Swarm app (formerly FourSquare) to check in to cultural venues that I go to as I like to keep track of when I was last at a place and how often I've been there. This evening my phone informed me that I had been to the Rose Theatre (since getting an iPhone) forty times. This was one of the very best of those forty evenings.

I am keen to support Rose Theatre as much as I can and so I need an excuse not to see something rather than to see it. Normally the best excuse Rose gives me for missing something is failing to tell me about it in time but that did not happen with All My Sons and I was able to get a seat in my preferred area on one of my preferred days, A42 which cost me £36.

If I had need an excuse to see All My Sons then the name Arthur Miller would have been good enough.

I went knowing nothing about the play and so I sat down in my seat, with a pint of Black Sheep Bitter, keen to learn. We were in the garden of a decent American house just after the last World War, and there we stayed.

The main players were the occupiers of the house, Joe and Kate Keller and their thirty-something son Chris. Joining them in the garden were Ann, a young friend of the family who had recently returned after a year away, two neighbouring couples and the memory of their other son, Larry, who went missing a few years ago during the war.

Larry's absence, or death, was the opening theme of the play with a tree planted in his honour having been blown down in the night and Chris trying to persuade Ann to help him to convince his mother that Larry was not just missing and was not coming home.

The other talk was general catching up with Ann on things that had happened in the last year or so and some thoughts about the future. It was not far off being a typical relaxed and meaningless discussion between family and friends. There were a few hints of resentment and disdain but, as I said, it was a typical discussion between people who knew each other well.

Then the word "murderer" was dropped like a bombshell.

The theme of the play suddenly changed to an incident in Joe Keller's past where, as the owner of a munitions factory, he had allowed some faulty parts to be shipped and these had led to the deaths of twenty odd American servicemen. He had been found to not be directly responsible and had been released after a trial while an engineer, Ann's father, had gone to prison, and was still there.

To complicate things further, Ann had been in a relationship with Larry and was now planning to marry Chris (nobody had told Kate). Then there was Ann's brother George who was still angry at his father's imprisonment and blamed Joe for this.

The main story came to dominate the play and there were more bombshells to shunt the story forward, including a letter from Larry to Ann and a defining decision from Joe. It was a strong and gripping plot but it was just the backbone of the play and there was a lot hanging off it with all of the characters adding interest and colour to the drama. Making this work was a simple set and a magnificent ensemble cast with Penny Downie as Kate impressing me the most.

My only reservation, and it is an odd one, is wondering why Rose Theatre is doing plays like this which are very much Richmond Theatre territory. Rose seems unsure if it is modern and imaginative or classic and traditional. Luckily I like both sorts of plays and both theatres.

All My Sons had the dark themes and intense dialogue that I expected from my limited exposure to Arthur Miller (Crucible and Salesman) and it lived up to their reputations. This skillful production turned a good play into a triumph.

Death of a Salesman at the Noël Coward Theatre

My theatre-going has two main strands, gorging myself on new plays in small theatres and feasting on the classics in large ones. The later is sometimes to revisit some favourites but more often it is to fill in embarrassing gaps in my theatrical experience. Gaps do not get much bigger that Death of a Salesman, though recently seen The Crucible came close.

That meant that I would have been tempted by almost any old version of Death of a Salesman that came my way so I was very lucky that the first one to do so came from the RSC and came with a formidable reputation. A lot of that formidable reputation came from Antony Sher who I had spent the best part of six hours watching on stage last December in Henry IV 1 and 2.

I can afford to pay for expensive theatre tickets but it irks me to do so when so many West End shows are average at best. What pay £80 for an average West End show when you can see one average, two good and one excellent shows in small  theatres for the same price? That means that when I go to West End theatres I normally go high up and that is what I did this time. My Grand Circle seat A16 still cost me £37.50.

The view from there was excellent and I much prefer to look down at the stage from up on high than to look up at it from the stalls. Looking down also means you can see the depth of the stage better. This time it also meant that I could see the upstairs bedroom clearly though not a lot happened there.

The view was obscured by the safety rail, another reason why the ticket was so "cheap", but this was not a huge problem and all I had to  do was sit up a little  when the action was in the house (which it was most of the time) and slide down a little when it moved to the front of the stage  which was, at times, a  street, a bar and an office.

The play was a slow moving tale of an American family, not unlike Long Day's Journey into Night, and it was the telling of the tale that mattered, not how it ended. Which is just as well as the main element of the ending was given away in the play's title and the secondary element was suggested shortly into the play. And that is how I like things. Endings are relatively short and while they are important the much longer journey to get there is more so, especially as a cute ending is only really cute the first time whereas a great journey rewards repeating.

This journey was led by the salesman, Willy Loman, who at 63 years old was looking to swap his travelling role for one based in New York where he lived. He was encouraged in this by his wife Linda. They also had to contend with their two sons, Biff and Happy, who were both living at home and struggling to get a start on life. Complicating the picture was Willy's older brother, Uncle Ben, who had made his fortune in Africa and who appeared, ghost like, to talk to Willy.

This combination of generations and circumstances allowed Arthur Miller to explore the American Dream from several angles and in some depth, which he does passionately but without prejudice - there are winners as well as losers and the losers made their choices along the way.

While by no means dominating the story Willy Loman filled large chunks of it and so the performance of Antony Sher was central to the performance and he was utterly magnificent. It was hard to believe that Willy Loman had once been Falstaff. The rest of the small cast had very important roles to play to and they were all very good.

Death of a Salesman had been collecting five star reviews with ease and while I do not award stars myself I can easily see that they were justified. This was an iconic production of an iconic play.

Stella cast for The Crucible at The Old Vic

The Crucible at the Old Vic was one of the "must see" plays of the Summer (the other was A Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic, just down the road) and I duly bought my ticket some months in advance. I was not entirely convinced though and I balked at paying anything like the top price and so I went for a seat (B26) in the Lilian Baylis Circle, i.e. the top level. Even up there I had to fork out £30.

It was another work in Reading day but the transport worked well (the main risk was the time it can take to get from the office to Reading station by bus) and I got to Waterloo in good time to try another tasty West Cornwall Pasty before diving in to The Pit Bar for a beer.

Fed and watered I trudged to the top of the building to take my seat. It was comfortable enough and the view was fine.

The stage was arranged differently from my previous visits being almost in the round with a few seats to the side of the stage and a few more at the back. To be honest I am not sure that the arrangement worked for everybody as it was a fairly static performance, it's a play of words not actions, which meant that some people would have spent some time looking at the back of the person talking. I had no such trouble up in the gods.

For all that Arthur Miller was a big name playwright I had never seen one of his plays before and had little idea of what to expect. The running time of over three hours, with an interval on top of that, was something of a clue that this could be a long smouldering American drama in the vein of Long Day's Journey into Night or, more recently, Dances with Wolves. And so it proved to be.

The Crucible told the story of the Salem Witch Trials where a bit of fun, girls dancing in the woods, leads to accusations of witchcraft and this is then blamed for everything bad that happens and suspicious eyes were turned on any behaviour deemed unusual. Behaviour like reading.

A group of honest villagers got caught up in this and were unable to protest their innocence against a tide of supposition and superstition. It did not end well.

As the poster at the top shows, this was billed as a vehicle for Richard Armitage and his appearances in Robin Hood, Spooks and The Hobbit had pushy mums bring their precious children by the truckload. They must have wondered why.

Armitage, as the main hero John Proctor, was convincing enough but he played it a little too close to his other roles, particularly his Spooks character Lucas North, for my liking as he was swept along by events and was powerless to stop them. Perhaps it was because of this type-casting that he was chosen for the role.

William Gaunt, who will always be super-powered secret agent Richard Barrett in The Champions to me, was superb as John's friend who was also entangled in the allegations and who faced them with steely determination and also acceptance of the inevitable.

The story turned when a senior cleric arrived in the village to investigate the witchcraft stories and this was a turning point in the production too. Jack Ellis was absolutely brilliant as Deputy Governor Danforth and, for me, stole the show. He was certain, strong and ruthless as he barked out his instructions. He was the enemy that the villagers had to fear despite his good office. He became the centre of the play that had been a collection of disparate narratives.

The rest of the cast deserve a mention too because, frankly, they were all good.

The Crucible told its long story with some style and would could have been a three hour trial for the audience passed by ridiculously quickly. The ending was a little obvious and was made the weaker for happening off-stage, shades of Chekhov there, but the point of the play was the journey, not the destination, and that was taut, tense and terrifying.

I enjoyed The Crucible a lot, and felt exhausted by the ride at the end, but somehow, as with Streetcar, it did not quite reach the heights that I expected of it and so a good performance ended up feeling a little disappointing.