Theatre News

Suchet & Wanamaker Lead All My Sons at Apollo

As previously tipped (See The Goss, 5 Oct 2009), David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker will lead the cast in a new production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, which opens on 27 May 2010 (previews from 19 May).

The production is directed by Howard Davies, who also helmed the National’s multi Olivier Award-winning revival in 2000 (See News, 23 Feb 2001), which featured a cast led by James Hazledine and Julie Walters as husband and wife Joe and Kate Keller.

This time round, Suchet stars as Keller, the man who has sacrificed his honour to maintain his family’s prosperity. His wife, Kate (Wanamaker), has managed to hide her knowledge of Joe’s previous crimes, but things come to a head when their son decides to marry the former fiancée of his lost brother. Miller is believed to have based the play around a true story from World War Two, when a manufacturer knowingly allowed defective tank parts to be shipped out.

Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his major work Death of a Salesman, and his other celebrated plays include The Crucible and A View From the Bridge, which was seen earlier this year at the West End’s Duke of York’s theatre starring Ken Stott (See News, 17 Oct 2008).

David Suchet is best known to TV fans for his portrayal of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. He starred opposite Richard Dreyfuss in the world premiere of Joe Sutton’s Complicit at the Old Vic earlier this year, and was seen in the West End in 2007 in The Last Confession, which transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket from Chichester Festival. His other major West End credits include Amadeus (which also transferred to Broadway), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Oleanna and Man and Boy.

Zoe Wanamaker’s myriad stage credits include, for the National Theatre, Much Ado About Nothing, His Girl Friday, Battle Royal, The Crucible and The Rose Tattoo. Her other theatre work includes Electra (Donmar and New York), for which she won the Best Actress Olivier, and on Broadway, Awake and Sing!, for which she was Tony-nominated. Her screen credits include My Family, Gormenghast, Doctor Who and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

All My Sons, which was also revived on Broadway last year with a cast including John Lithgow and Katie Holmes, is produced in the West End by Kim Poster, Sonia Friedman and Eric Falkenstein.