All My Sons review, Wyndham’s Theatre: Bryan Cranston is magnetic in this masterful staging of Arthur Miller’s tragedy

There’s an almost unbearable heaviness to Ivo van Hove’s powerful revival of All My Sons, staged with a crushing gravity underneath a giant glowing sun. Bryan Cranston has an undeniable pull as its wily American patriarch, oppressed by the knowledge that he’s betrayed everyone he loves just to make a quick buck. But the pain that resonates most strongly is portrayed by Paapa Essiedu as his optimistic son, crushed under the colossal weight of his father’s moral failings.

Arthur Miller’s play is nominally set in the ordinary backyard of a house in small-town, postwar Ohio. Characteristically, Van Hove strips away the physical trappings of midcentury America here – just as he did in his other landmark Miller revival, 2015’s A View From A Bridge – but it’s a rich, evocative kind of minimalism. Above the stage, a giant round aperture is made to glow with rich sunset hues, thanks to Jan Versweyveld’s mesmeric lighting design, which frames the actors who appear in it like they’re messengers from another world. A fallen cherry tree crowds the bare stage, its stumpy limbs disconcertingly human.

Wealthy couple Joe and Kate planted it in memory of their pilot son Larry, who went missing in action in the Second World War three years ago. As successful factory owner Joe, Cranston faces his grief with a statesmanlike pragmatism – he’s too aware of his image in the neighbourhood to let the mask slip. His wife sees no reason to pretend. Marianne Jean-Baptiste has profound depths as this mother who’s unable to face reality – she’s fragile, but never weak, as she tells everyone that her lost boy will soon step back into the shoes she’s kept nicely polished.

Her other son, Chris, isn’t so sure. Essiedu delivers a characteristically stellar performance as a younger brother who’s high on the drug of righteous optimism. The past is in the past, he reckons. And now, in the present, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t marry Larry’s former girlfriend Annie – who’s given a sturdy, appealing positivity by Hayley Squires. Essiedu might be 35 but there’s something so brilliantly adolescent about his performance here. When Annie kisses him, he visibly looks to one side to process this unexpected new piece of information before deciding he’s happy about it. When his money-obsessed father asks him despairingly if intellectual fulfilment is so important (“You have to be inspired?”), he answers with a fantastically sarcastic “Yuh”, and the two crash into a hug that’s dangerously close to a paternal throttling.

This Chris has so much youthful buoyancy that you can totally believe he’s been taken in by his shadier father. He’s an idealist, not a hypocrite. And that makes it even more tragic when he sinks, dragged down by this play’s ugly revelations about the bleak side of American profiteering. Annie’s brother George (Tom Glynn-Carney) crashes belatedly into the story to tell the truth; he’s like a force from a dark fable, bringing a horror story energy to this suburban backyard.

Van Hove manages something ingenious here, creating a version of suburban American that’s abstract and epic – while still humming with the sense of a local community that bustles into the backyard for tense little exchanges or leisurely card games. When this story’s tragedy reaches its full force, that thrum of gossip becomes a nightmarish mosquito whine. Joe hasn’t just displeased his community; he’s angered the old gods, and his downfall is absolute.

‘All My Sons’ is playing at Wyndham’s Theatre until 7 March 2026; tickets here