SINS OF THE FATHER

Bryan Cranston is magnetic in this masterful staging of Arthur Miller's tragedy 'All My Sons'

- Annabel Nugent

Wyndham's Theatre

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