The premiere of a new theatre is a beautiful thing. So first up, the real opening night star is the Sydney City Council which purchased the old Baptist Tabernacle in Darlinghurst and converted it into the 200-seat Eternity Playhouse. It’s a gem.
But so too is this Arthur Miller classic, arguably his best play, with which the resident Darlinghurst Theatre Company chose to premiere Eternity.
All My Sons is a gripping family drama. With crystal precision and a thriller pace, it reveals over one day in 1947 how the criminal and moral blindness of a father has infected his family and brings the wider world crashing into their backyard. The bullish head of a lucrative engineering company, Joe Keller knowingly delivered faulty parts to US fighter planes, sending scores of wartime pilots to their death and, just possibly, his own son who disappeared three years earlier.
Mother Kate refuses to consider their son dead but the remaining son Chris – celebrated by Joe as his business heir – now plans to marry his brother’s former sweetheart. Annie arrives for the announcement but the tension crackles whenever talk turns to her father, who as Joe’s business partner still languishes in prison paying for Joe’s crimes. The arrival of Annie’s embittered brother – and new revelations – sets in relentless train events and climaxes familiar to Greek tragedy.
This sense of classic inevitability and Miller’s dark themes around family loyalty and social responsibility are well served in Ian Sinclair’s uncomplicated production and Luke Ede’s modest backyard set. An excellent cast comfortably builds the naturalistic truth of the play and characters, even if some rhythms and beats are still lost. Marshall Napier is outstanding as Joe, his tense defensiveness battened down with a folksy bonhomie. Toni Scanlan’s Kate sees – and suffers – the truth more clearly, as she flashes between stoic grief and fey charms.
As the next generation, yearning for new starts but burdened by old guilt, Meredith Penman as Annie (who this week leaves the cast early) and especially Andrew Henry as Chris are very fine. Chris by the end stands as an almost too pure beacon of social responsibility. The tapestry of neighbour reaction to the Keller’s – whether envy, resentment, small town disregard or moral ambiguity – is nicely etched out by the remaining cast.
While some auteur directors are provoking debate about the worth of radically reworking classics into contemporary fables, Sinclair shows in this case the power of sticking to the polished script and classic strengths of a master playwright.
Musical punctuation and the distant drone of aircraft, above the chirping birds out on the back porch, are the only concessions to abstraction. Yet the play yells out at us today. No matter its time and American setting, All My Sons is our world, one easily familiar with corrupting arms deals in Iraq and Afghanistan and a modern politics where care for humanity so often stops with the family.
Review: 4 stars out of 5
All My Sons – 6 November 2013
Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst
Season until 1 December
Director: Iain Sinclair
