Very impressive, this. Miller's play is a study in tautness - there isn't a wasted line, and it feels far shorter than it is - and it's well served by this staging. It's the oldies who really dazzled - Dianne Wiest was completely compelling, and John Lithgow not much shaded by her. They inhabit their characters while bringing them to life through gestures small and large, and the sense of forgetting that I was watching a play came most frequently when one or both of them held central focus on the stage. But Katie Holmes was extremely good too (also, much taller than you probably imagine), including on the dramatic high points required of her, and Patrick Wilson's (who I recently saw in Hard Candy) performance, while a touch uneven I thought, was also very good. (Needless to say, it gave me a kick to be sitting just a few metres away from all of them - I had a pretty sweet seat, just a few rows from the stage.)
All four are excellent when it comes to modulating their characters, rendering them at once sympathetic and flawed in ways which feel real rather than staged, so that the unfolding of events and unveiling of layers of personality feel both natural and inevitable (though that also owes much to Miller's craft in having seeded the hints of what's to come from early on). "All My Sons" strikes me as a very moral play - I don't think it's unfair to say that the play is, above all else, 'about' responsibility for one's actions and beliefs - and here, that aspect of it was fully brought ought and allowed to play out...it really was good stuff.
