A stellar Old Vic debut for Jenna the young Vic!
ARTHUR Miller’s 1947 play about an American family whose eldest son went missing during the Second World War can deliver a hefty emotional punch.
It has a harrowing sense of its characters going to hell in a handcart. For an audience, it can feel like we’re going to need to buckle up if we’re to make it home for Horlicks.
I’m not sure I ever felt much troubled by Jeremy Herrin’s stellar new production featuring Sally Field, Jenna Coleman, Bill Pullman and Colin Morgan.
Each of these impressive actors seems capable of delivering a mighty performance – but equally there are times when they feel like they are doing their own private turn. Pullman is always good to watch as the self-made businessman father who’s dodged jail for manufacturing faulty aeroplanes.
The actor is best known for playing the President in the Independence Day films and here he’s an impressive bundle of tics – rolling a shoulder, adjusting his pants and muttering (sometimes inaudibly) to keep his guilt at bay. But mostly he squeezes his face into an inscrutable smile as though defying anyone tough enough to put him out of his misery. The sparrow-like Field is also thoroughly absorbing as his wife and steadfastly deluded mother of their missing son.
Her plump cheeks, pleading smile and crinkled brow are well-known from her role as the matriarch in US TV’s Brothers and Sisters. Here she defends her nest by sinking emotional talons into her prey, then suffocating them with beaming maternal warmth. It’s an impressively savage strategy, but makes her seem more controlling than desperate.
For Jenna Coleman, meanwhile, it’s a guarded West End debut. She’s best known as Doctor Who’s former side-kick and for the considerable feat of making Queen Victoria seem a little bit saucy when she played the monarch on TV. Here she is the missing son’s ex-girlfriend who harbours a major secret and who’s taken up with his little brother. She is entering a majorly awkward situation with the family, but seems tough and equal to it when she should feel emotionally exposed.
Morgan though, best known as the BBC’s Merlin, has the trickiest job getting some seriously conflicting emotions over the line as the surviving younger son. He’s got brooding intensity in spades but felt to me more lost in private thoughts – even giving himself a toe massage in the wicker garden sofa outside the clapboard family home. Torn between confronting his parents and putting them on a pedestal, I never felt the rage his character is trying to suppress.
For all this star appeal, the show doesn’t really kick off until Oliver Johnstone shows up in the second half as Coleman’s sweaty brother who’s looking to gain revenge after Pullman framed his father.
He’s a terrifying emotional hand-grenade rolled across the lawn. Even then everyone else seems a little too secure around him, offering not so much crash and burn as prang and smoulder.