There is nothing radically wrong with the Howard Davies revival of Arthur Miller's first major play. I just wonder what it is doing on the stage of the Cottesloe. The play has had two excellent London productions in the past 20 years, and becomes the third American show in a row at our increasingly bland National, a venue that, under Trevor Nunn, seems as Europhobic as the British press.
Miller's 1947 play does have its virtues. It deals with the divorce between action and re sponsibility: in particular with Joe Keller, a thriving businessman, who shifts the blame for producing cracked cylinder heads in wartime on to his partner and sends 21 airmen to their deaths. Joe's ultimate defence is that he did everything for his family. But one son, Larry, has gone missing in action; the other, Chris, finds his prospective marriage to Larry's ex-fiancée blocked by his obdurate mother and tainted by familial guilt.
Miller's play is not just an at tack on war-profiteering: it also becomes a fierce assault on a "practical" morality that places money, success and family above individual conscience. But, though it expresses important truths, the play lapses into melodrama: everything hinges on the production of a letter kept hidden for three years by Larry's ex-fiancée Ann. Any Victorian dramatist would have blushed at such a device; it also casts doubts on the whole of the preceding action, including Ann's subscription to the myth of Joe's innocence.
Davies seems to recognise that the play is as much melodrama as moral indictment. He begins with a violent storm that sends the wind rushing through the willows of William Dudley's set and has lightning illuminating the clapboard porch and traverse lawn: we seem to be in the world of The Omen as much as early Miller. Davies also sanctions some feverish over-acting, especially from Julie Wal ters who, as Mrs Keller, signals her own secret guilt by pointing an accusatory finger at everyone in sight in the manner of a berserk traffic-cop.
Fortunately, there are quieter performances from James Hazeldine as the blustering, hollow Joe who seems like an early draft of Willy Loman, from Duncan Bell as a neighbourly doctor and, most especially, from Catherine McCormack who lends the strangely motivated Ann a tremulous, thoroughbred sensitivity. But I'm still puzzled as to why the National is reviving this now. If they want a play about the sacrifice of public safety to private profit, Ibsen's Pillars of Society is both rarer and more telling. Little chance of that, however, at our safety-first National Theatre.
In rep until October 18. Box office: 020-7452 3000 .
