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Review Round-up: More Luck for Rare Miller Play

More than 50 years after it first premiered, Arthur Miller’s play The Man Who Had All the Luck may have found its own overdue luck with the critics, thanks to the Donmar Warehouse’s revival of the rarely seen play, which opened last night (5 March 2008, previews from 28 February). It continues until 5 April at the Covent Garden venue and then tours to Manchester, Liverpool and Truro in Cornwall.

In the American mid-West, David Beeves is a young car mechanic blessed – or cursed? - with almost supernatural good fortune. While those around him suffer life’s regular blows, everything goes David’s way. At the Donmar Warehouse, Andrew Buchan stars in Sean Holmes’ production

The Man Who Had All the Luck was Miller’s first Broadway play, but when it opened in 1944, it closed after only four performances. Following the failure of the play, which was based on an earlier repeatedly rejected novel, the discouraged author, then in his twenties, vowed that he would never write another play. Fortunately, he didn’t stick to that vow and his subsequent efforts within the next five years - All My Sons and Death of a Salesman - achieved much greater success.

First night critics at the Donmar were somewhat mystified as to why Miller’s play was such a flop first time round. Though they identified an inevitable immaturity to the writing, they were also fascinated by its portent of things to come in the playwright’s later works. The piece is well served by Sean Holmes’ “riveting” and “invigorating” production, led by the “fresh-faced” if occasionally “placid” Andrew Buchan. As Beeves’ more luckless relatives, Michelle Terry, Felix Scott and Nigel Cooke’s performances are also “urgent and persuasive”. Altogether, the production helps unearth a Miller that, while “minor” is nonetheless “intriguing”.

Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph – “Watching this rare revival, it is hard to understand why the piece was such a failure. It isn't in the same league as Miller's masterpieces, but Sean Holmes' fine production grips from the start and never lets go. Like so much of Miller's work, what initially appears to be a piece of slice-of-life naturalism also works powerfully as a moral fable, and the drama anticipates many of the dramatist's later themes, most significantly the vexed relationship between fathers and their sons … The great virtue of Holmes' production is that it puts flesh and blood on what might easily seem a glib little fable, so that you become engrossed in both plot and characters. Andrew Buchan's fresh-faced everyman hero manages to make the curse of good luck seem persuasive, Nigel Cooke has just the right twitchy, monomaniacal intensity as the father, while Felix Scott's howling anguish over his failed baseball career has a harrowing intensity. But there isn't a single weak performance in this fascinating play about the burning human need for a sense of justice in the universe.”

- by Terri Paddock

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	The Man Who Had All the Luck - 6th Mar 2008 reviews