The American actor Bryan Cranston was magnificent as the unravelling TV news anchor in Ivo van Hove’s superb 2017 stage adaptation of Network, seen first at the National Theatre, then on Broadway. Teaming up again with the feted Belgian director for his West End debut, the 69-year-old star of Breaking Bad is magnificent once more, this time in Arthur Miller’s 1947 drama of warped family and American values.
Cranston leads a superb cast as patriarch Joe Keller, a businessman haunted by his shirked responsibility for supplying the military with faulty aircraft cylinders during the war, with fatal consequences. Van Hove first made a splash, over a decade ago, with his pared-back staging of A View from the Bridge, another Miller classic of tormented conformist masculinity.
Although he has had his gimmick-laden misfires since, the virtue of this production is again its spare focus. The Kellers’ suburban backyard is abstractly rendered: its dominant feature is a memorial tree to missing-in-action son Larry symbolically felled by a nighttime storm, a cataclysm witnessed in the opening moments by Joe’s restless wife, Kate.
