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Arthur Miller's All My Sons To Be Revived in West End, with Wanamaker and Suchet
By Mark Shenton
30 Oct 2009
Zoë Wanamaker and David Suchet are to star in a new West End production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons, to be directed by Howard Davies, who previously directed the play at the National Theatre in 2000.
It will begin performances at the Apollo Theatre May 19, 2010, prior to an official opening May 27. Davies, who won both the 2000 Evening Standard and 2001 Olivier Award for Best Director for his earlier production, is reunited with the same creative team from that staging, including set designer William Dudley, lighting designer Mark Henderson, composer Dominic Muldowney and sound designer Paul Groothuis. The West End production is being produced by Kim Poster for Stanhope Productions, Sonia Friedman for Sonia Friedman Productions and Eric Falkenstein.
Miller's All My Sons originally premiered on Broadway in 1947, and has been twice filmed, in 1948 and 1986. It won the 1947 Tony Award for Best Play. It was last revived on Broadway in 2008, in a production directed by British director Simon McBurney with a cast that included John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and Katie Holmes.
The play revolves around Joe Keller (Suchet), who is alleged to have supplied World War II fighter planes with defective engines, leading to the deaths of innocent pilots — a crime for which his business partner took the fall. One of Keller's sons, himself a pilot, is thought to have been killed in action. But his mother (Wanamaker) can't accept his death and equally, can't accept that her dead son's fiancee has transferred her affections to her other surviving son. The confrontations that ensue lead to the uncovering of a shameful family secret.
Wanamaker was last seen on the London stage when she starred as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing opposite Simon Russell Beale's Benedick at the National's Olivier Theatre in December 2007, and was last seen on Broadway in 2006 in Lincoln Center's production of Awake and Sing!, for which she was nominated for the 2006 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. She has also previously been nominated in the same category for her Broadway appearances in Piaf in 1981 (reprising a performance she first played for the RSC, also directed by Davies) and Loot in 1986, and was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play in 1999 for her performance in the title role of Electra that she had originally played at London's Donmar Warehouse and won an Olivier Award for. New York born, she is the daughter of Sam Wanamaker (founder of London's Shakespeare's Globe). She was seen on screen as Madame Hooch in the film "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone."
Suchet was last seen on the London stage in Complicit at the Old Vic in January 2009. Best known for playing the title role in the long-running TV dramatization of Agatha Christie's "Poirot," his other stage credits include Roger Crane's The Last Confession (at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in 2007), Once in a Lifetime (National Theatre, 2005), Amadeus (in which he played Salieri at the Old Vic in Peter Hall's 1998 revival, then reprised the role in the Broadway transfer to the Music Box Theatre in 1999), Harold Pinter's Royal Court production of the British premiere of David Mamet's Oleanna (Duke of York's, 1993) and Separation (Hampstead, then Comedy Theatre, 1987).
In addition to his Olivier win for All My Sons, Davies has also won the Best Director Award for his O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh in 1999, in a production that starred Kevin Spacey that subsequently transferred to Broadway. Other Broadway transfers include his RSC productions of Piaf in 1981 and Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1987 and a West End production of Private Lives in 2002, all of which he was Tony nominated for Best Director of a Play for. He also directed Spacey in A Moon for the Misbegotten that transferred from the Old Vic to Broadway in 2007, and originated new productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, My Fair Lady and Translations on Broadway as well.
Further casting and box office details are still to be announced.
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