All My Sons

(Apollo Theatre, 26 June 2010)

Each aspires to dignity, none is obviously mistaken, each treats others unequally. All are human, which is unacceptable to some characters.

Not knowing or unable to practice the second-best strategy in life, one can resort to the safest strategy, integrity. (Which is also the first-best one.) Integrity requires constrained selflessness, which is unconstrained selfishness.

It is hard to forgive a friend's or a relative's offence, as such an offence is aggravated by the concomitant deception, without which the offence would have been anticipated. It is harder still to forgive one's own self-deception, which exposes the disturbing lack of control over one's own life, not just the lives of others.

An ideal society is not that which creates no temptation, but that which allows for temptation but teaches individuals to overcome it when they would benefit from doing so. Teaching requires forgiveness. Because individuals differ, for some, freedoms will be excessive and punishments too harsh, and their lives' value will lie in the lessons to others. The society evolves as its members learn---through arts, education, and lucky encounters.

The actors convey the passion without forcing the characters to appear extrovert. Voices are raised only infrequently, to emphasise an idea, never to broadcast an emotion. The assumed accents, consistent across players, emerge from characters, not from actors.

For two hours, the actors live on stage. It is hard to live the life of a bad man (unless this is the live of one's own). Hence, out of necessity, each actor has crafted a good, rich life to portray. When these lives clash, no amplification is required.

A character must be more subtle than the audience expects him to be. Subtlety creates suspense, makes the audience think and thus contribute to the play. In the Arthur Miller's minimalist play, much of the subtlety is created by the actors (David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker) and the director (Howard Davies).