Arthur Miller’s “All my sons” at the National Theater with Kim hauge, Petronella Barker, Hermann Sabado, Stive Fevik – Dagsavisen

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THEATRE

“All My Sons”

By Arthur Miller

Director: Maren Bjørseth

With Kim Haugen, Petronella Barker, Hermann Sabado, Stine Fevik, Olav Waastad, Tone Mostraum, Bernhard Arnø, Seda Witt, Leo Magnus de la Nuez

The National Theatre, Main Stage

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Arthur Miller vowed that if “All My Sons” was as big a flop on Broadway as his first play had been, canceled after only four performances, he would find another profession. But perhaps America’s foremost playwright did not have to change pastures. “Alle mine soner” (1946) remains one of his greatest successes. It’s easy to see why, and one can only imagine the impact it left a few short years after the war ended, seen through a family seething with secrets and lies, all starting from two adult sons who were sent out for fighting in World War II. Only one returned home. The pitch-black backdrop must not be brightened in any way.

The play is perhaps not as well known here at home as, for example, “Death of a traveling salesman” and “Witch Hunt”, the latter an allegory of McCarthyism, which Miller himself became acquainted with after “All my sons”. When the hunt for communists intensified, Miller was scrutinized for “Un-American Activities” after his scathing criticism of American capitalism, of war profiteers and of the American dream in the play now staged at the National Theatre.

Maren Bjørseth’s production of “Witch Hunt” at Oslo Nye Teater had a short life during the pandemic. Now she takes on Miller again, and the interpretation of the play’s toxic betrayal and fragile interpersonal bonds is both fine-tuned and dramatically toured. Not to forget the humour, which in Bjørseth’s rhythmic twists is almost danced out with the elegant use of a well-composed ensemble.

The action starts after a stormy night. A tree the Keller family planted in memory of their son Larry, who was reported missing during a tour with the air force three years earlier, has been blown over. But more will be uprooted during the day ahead. The father Joe Keller (Kim Haugen) is the manager of the local factory, and his son Chris (Hermann Sabado) works for him. They are both convinced that Larry died on the day his plane was reported missing, while his mother Kate (Petronella Barker) lives in the complete conviction that Larry is alive. In her desperation to maintain the lie of life, she seeks proof in the superstitious and refuses others to claim the opposite.

Chris has invited Ann (Stine Fevik), Larry’s girlfriend from before the war and the daughter of Joe’s former partner, to come and live with them for a few days. Chris wants to propose to Ann, and she wants to say yes. Much to Kate’s dismay, Ann has stopped waiting for Larry. And Ann’s arrival also brings other dross to the surface. Her father is in prison for causing the lives of at least 21 young fighter pilots after sending a defective batch of aircraft engine cylinder heads out of the factory during the war.

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His superior, Joe Keller, was acquitted on appeal, while Ann’s father was left to bear the blame alone. The Keller family is convinced of the father’s innocence. The neighbors, on the other hand, have always suspected that Joe Keller was also guilty, which Ann’s father has always claimed. But everyone turns good looks into plain games, and Joe has become a unifying figure in the community. In Kim Haugen’s character, we see the smoldering and contradictory nature of the local magnate, the menacing under the jovial surface that makes this character one of Miller’s most fascinating. Here we see the American double standard taking shape, and when it breaks, so does the dream.

It is a classic moral drama about guilt and innocence, about hidden lies, cynicism and letting others pay for their own mistakes. First and foremost, it is about cowardice. Cowardice to admit, cowardice to acknowledge. Bjørseth’s direction is tight, but at the same time playful. The quivering bonds between the family members are further strained by the surrounding figures. The boy Bert whom Joe has designated as the street “policeman”, vividly preoccupied with the “prison”. The Lubey couple, he with his horoscopes, the doctor in all his busyness and his wife again who has her own agenda to stop a marriage between Chris and Ann. And George, Ann’s brother who also shows up, straight from his father’s prison. When the curtain goes down for the break, his arrival becomes a small stroke of genius of a “cliffhanger”.

Olav Myrtvedt’s scenography is initially a solid studio canvas where a video projects something close to a kaleidoscope carpet of square pieces that change shape, as in a puzzle, or in a computer code that can fall into place at any time. But before it gets that far, what is revealed is the Keller family’s home and garden. The period image is the late 1940s, only slightly hinted at through Alva Walderhaug Brosten’s costumes. There is no other fixtures here than the eventually empty rig, Clemet Irbil’s contrast-filled play with light and dark, and white plastic chairs of the simplest kind, the kind that can be stacked for a garden party. But they can also be carried away, and destroyed like pieces in a game. They are almost unbreakable, yet fragile. And they are empty. One for every young soldier who died.

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The actors lift the whole with intense presence and good and detailed acting. It’s lovely to see Kim Haugen and Petronella Barker in two advanced roles like this, two of the National Theatre’s foremost who here both cling to and crash into each other. Barker as the mother who at first wonders if she has gone, as Joe says, crazy, but who, through Kate, carries Miller’s in-depth examination of family ties as she uses all means to save the scraps of the Keller togetherness. Sabado and Fevik have both the chemistry and the defiance about them which distance them from their parents, which make them representatives of a new and truth-seeking generation, and thus Miller’s political claw in the whole thing. Sabado and Haugen as father and son are like watching a dam burst, where they are both taken by the dangerous and dark undercurrents.

Olav Waastad also makes a wonderful physical appearance as the labile and stern-eyed George, while Tone Mostraum is the target bearer of the comic with a performance that could have been too classically laconic Mostraum, but which works here because Bjørseth adapts it as a contrast in the play’s other rhythm and almost cinematic undertones in the music, as usual intensely and effectively composed and played by Alf Lund Godbolt.

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It is not a production entirely without loose ends, but Miller’s large ensemble and many characters in the peripheral zone fulfill their function, as bearers of foreshadowing and as witnesses to the final downfall of the Keller family, one that began a long time ago, but is now underway with crushing the ground beneath them when the carpet is literally pulled away. Miller’s text is also not without the occasional logical flaw. But that is the weight of the play, Bjørseth’s grasp of the classical layers which she peels off with an almost intuitive temperament, which after a slightly loose first part is tightened in a vise through the second act. It is the weight of the cruel truth that we know must come to light, the consequences of the actions and choices that have been made, and the realization when the veils of certainty are pulled aside, which eventually make “Alle mine soner” a great theatrical experience.