The West End's Equivalent of a Blockbuster...

I saw Arthur Miller's All My Sons yesterday having heard nothing but fantastic reviews about it. I studied The Crucible all the way back in year eleven and subsequently had all of my interest in the play or the playwright driven out of me by a combination of over-analysis and a very bad film version that we were forced to watch, so I walked into the theatre with a slightly heightened sense of scepticism.

David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker take the lead roles but one of my favourite actors, Stephen Campbell Moore, was also on the billing and was one of the main reasons I decided to escape to London for a day to see it.

Any apprehensions I had were immediately banished when I saw the set, a beautiful set of garden furniture speckled with the overhead gobos to give a perfectly realistic 1930's-America-at-dusk feel.
I could talk about the clever stage dynamics or the perfect costumes or the thoughtful lighting, but I simply don't have time to write about all of those things and would prefer to focus on the acting, which was, possibly, the best I've seen on stage.

Most people know David Suchet as the eccentric Belgian detective, Poirot, so hearing his spot-on American accent was very nearly surreal.
All of the accents, in fact, were done to a t. I can imagine that even one bad American accent would have ruined the entire play but the actors had obviously done a hell of a lot of prep for this production.

Now, I've mentioned the one of the reasons I went to see this play was because Stephen Campbell Moore was in it. The last production he did on stage, and later in film, was Alan Bennett's The History Boys. I read an interview in which he said he'd been offered scripts since then but none of them compared with that, so he couldn't allow himself to take them. However, when offered the part of Chris, he couldn't turn it down.
So, having come to see the very well-spoken, timid-looking British actor play a challenging role I was pretty upset to see, what I thought was, the understudy in his place. A man carrying off a bold, deep American accent and giving an experienced soldier's view of the world and the war and the distance between those two things made him an interesting character and I was prepared to sing his praises, despite him not being the actor I'd come to see when, upon looking closer, I realised it actually was Moore.
This character, so far from the actor's usual roles, completely blew me away. There was something energitic about seeing a man, typcast as a bit of a wet-blanket, playing a hardened soldier, falling in love and trying to keep his insane family from burning itself out.

I shan't spoil it all for those who haven't seen it, but I will say that, very close to the end, there is a gunshot heard from inside the house. I cannot possibly have been the only person in the audience who was half-expecting this seemingly-inevitable crack to rip through the troubled but determined atmosphere that had fallen over the play's climax, but the entire audience, myself included, almost hit the ceiling at the sound.

Silence is something which can be used, in films and theatre, in a million ways to create a million feelings and, I think, it is my favourite sound in live theatre, but I've never known a silence like that.
I've seen actors stand still, and silences fall onstage, and characters struggling to catch their breathe again but I have never known an audience, not just to be quiet, but to be silent. No one moved, or crossed or uncrossed their legs, or adjusted their atire, or lifted their hand to brush away a tear. It was a moment frozen in time and it was the most spectacular feeling I think I've ever known.

If I was asked one day, to chose a point in my life that I would like to go back to and re-live, it would be that moment of silence. The moment that was only a few seconds but, as cliched as it sounds, honestly did appear to stretch on into minutes or more.

When I was in London for a week, earlier this month, I saw five plays and a live music gig. They were all great, they were all worth seeing, but I haven't been able to write about them because they were very good productions which flowed and moved from point to point, which isn't at all a criticism, but All My Sons was different.
All My Sons seemed to be made up of moments, not from a production point of view, the production was fluid and every transition was seamless, but for the audience, as I can't think this is only my feeling of the play, the show was made up of memorable moments, burst of pure emotion and heart-fluttering seconds of a play which I cannot recommend enough.