Breaking Dad: Bryan Cranston Faces Family Despair – A Review by Patrick Marmion

All My Sons (Wyndham’s Theatre London)

Rating:

Bryan Cranston doesn’t half like putting himself through the wringer. Playing Walter White in Breaking Bad, he featured in some of the most harrowing scenes I’ve ever seen on television.

Now, the 69-year-old Californian is starring alongside Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Paapa Essiedu, in a new staging of Arthur Miller’s 1947 play about a wily World War II businessman whose eldest son has been missing in action for three years.

Not only does Miller supply heavyweight subject matter, his play is given a solemn, emotionally charged makeover by Belgian director Ivo van Hove – the man who skippered Cranston’s last West End appearance eight years ago (an adaptation of the 1970s film Network).

And, yes, van Hove is also the guy behind last year’s West End musical debacle Opening Night, which starred Sheridan Smith. 

This, though, is a stark, ceremonial production. Cranston’s casting as businessman Joe Keller is critical. 

He is a butter-wouldn’t-melt grandfather figure, wearing an all-American sky-blue shirt, beige chinos and matching cap. His warm smile belongs on a packet of corn flakes.

But, just like Walter White, he’s hiding a secret. And it all ends in a flood of snot and tears as the dark truth is pitilessly revealed.

Jean-Baptiste is brilliant, too, as his conspiring wife who refuses to give up on the idea that her missing son might one day return. 

Bryan Cranston (pictured) stars alongside Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Paapa Essiedu, in a new staging of Arthur Miller’s 1947 play about a wily World War II businessman whose eldest son has been missing in action for three years

This, though, is a stark, ceremonial production. Cranston’s casting as businessman Joe Keller is critical. The result is a harrowing journey into guilt-racked despair. Like it or not, it’s what keeps audiences and actors coming back to this play so often 

Her strength and vulnerability is a paradoxical combination few actors can pull off. As her youngest son Chris, Essiedu is often frustrated by his father, but is no less determined to believe in him. 

Essiedu’s innocence finds perfect expression in his love for his brother’s ex-girlfriend Ann (Hayley Squires). And yet her hand-wringing reminds us that something ain’t right.

My only beef is with the bare-bones staging. Right at the start, a 20-foot tree –planted as a memorial to the missing son – is torn down in a storm. 

All the subsequent action – two-and-a-quarter hours of it, without interval – takes place on and around the fallen trunk, which looks like a claw. 

But I tired of this mighty symbol, laid beneath a round window lit like a hostile yellow sun. Without furniture, the action is more baldly melodramatic.

The dirge-like atmosphere is sustained by plangent music and funereal laments by Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen. 

The result is a harrowing journey into guilt-racked despair. Like it or not, it’s what keeps audiences and actors coming back to this play so often.