The Lowdown on All My Sons, Coming to the Wyndham's Theatre in November

1. It stars Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston—so good in Network at the NT back in 2017—as Joe Keller in Arthur Miller’s 1947 breakthrough play All My Sons about how at the core of the apple of the American Dream lurks a worm. A very nasty, all-devouring worm.

2. It's a great role for Cranston. Meaty and complex about a man who destroys what he is trying to protect. Joe Keller is a successful businessman whose former business partner is in jail, convicted of supplying cracked cylinder heads for aircraft, which led to the deaths of 21 young airmen during the war. Joe was exonerated, and his younger son, war veteran Chris, has joined the thriving family firm. But this is no happy family. Older son Larry is missing in action, believed dead, something his mother, Kate, refuses to believe. But could the truth be even harder to accept? We are about to find out.

Bryan Cranston as Howard Beale in Network at the National Theatre. Photo by Jan Versweyveld.

3. It's a play which is clearly strongly influenced by Ibsen but has shades of Greek tragedy too. Like J.B. Priestley’s 1945 British play, An Inspector Calls, it is a play which subscribes to the notion that we do not live alone but are members of society, responsible for each other.  Miller said of Joe that his “trouble is not that he cannot tell right from wrong but that his cast of mind cannot admit that he, personally, has any viable connection with his world, his universe, or his society.”

4. It's being directed by Ivo van Hove, who worked with Cranston on Network. Even more crucially, Van Hove has already had considerable Miller success with The Crucible, but most notably with a blistering 2014 revival of A View From the Bridge, which released the play from its naturalistic trappings and found a terrifying savagery in it.

5. That could be crucial here because while Miller’s play is a rollicking good story of family secrets uncovered, it is also one where you can see the joins in the carpentry. It was Miller’s first big success. He wrote it while working in a factory making boxes, a job he continued to do even when the play was enjoying acclaim on Broadway, as if he couldn’t quite believe his own luck. Miller’s lack of experience shows. The first half spends a lot of time setting things up for the devastating revelations of the second half, so a director has to inject propulsion for the payoff to land for an audience. Van Hove made A View From the Bridge feel like a runaway train hurtling towards oblivion. If he succeeds in doing the same here, it will be a mighty evening.

Paapa Essiedu in The Effect at the National Theatre. Photo by Marc Brenner.

6. It's not just Cranston who is the draw here. Joe’s wife, Kate, is played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who on screen has often worked with Mike Leigh, most recently on the devastating Hard Truths. Kate is certainly about to be made to acknowledge some very hard truths. You may also have seen her in debbie tucker green’s hang at the Royal Court and The Amen Corner at the National Theatre.

7. One of theatre’s most blazing talents, Paapa Essiedu, plays Chris. If you have seen him on stage, you will remember him because he has such presence. He was a notable Hamlet for the RSC and has been seen in A Number at the Old Vic and The Effect at the NT.

8. Miller was a playwright of his time, the mid-20th century. His best plays hail from that era. Dominic Dromgoole put it well when he observed, “The work is loaded with the tension of that moment, the tension of lives under the Holocaust, under the bomb, under McCarthyism, under the Cold War, under the exquisite tensions of his own life. From the middle of that mess, he came up with some of the best sense of the century.”

Marianne Jean-Baptiste in hang at the Royal Court Theatre. Photo by Tristram Kenton.

9. But all great plays are plastic enough to seem relevant to our own society too. All My Sons concerns war profiteering, but the recent Covid pandemic and scandals around “VIP Lanes” for the supply of PPE suggest that it is a play written then which speaks to now and can be seen as a parable of our own times too.

10. The seeds of the play may have been sown during the crash of 1929 when the Miller family lost their business and fell on hard times in the Great Depression. It was when the Dream died for the young Miller, who aspired to be a playwright.  He was later to say, “I knew that the Depression was only incidentally a matter of money. Rather, it was a moral catastrophe, a violent revelation of the hypocrisies behind the façade of American society.”  In All My Sons, Miller showed just how deep those hypocrisies had wormed.

Cover image from All My Sons, playing at the Wyndham's Theatre from Fri 14 Nov 2025 to Sat 7 Feb 2026. Book your tickets via our website or app.