Alle meine Söhne (All my sons)

Arthur Miller uses a single family as an example to portray a society that has lost all its moral fibre in the pursuit of profit. A play about the search for truth and responsibility and unmasking a collective lie. The war has been over for a couple of years now. It came at a cost to Joe and Kate Keller, but it also gave them a great deal. Joe’s company delivered aircraft parts to the Air Force – a lucrative business and the basis of the family’s prosperity. However, a faulty delivery of cylinder heads from Joe’s factory was responsible for twenty-one fighter planes crashing in the Pacific. Joe was able to persuade the court of his innocence. But his former business partner Steve is still in prison. The rest is silence, the company is back in business, and the plan is for Joes’s son Chris to take over soon. Because only one of the Kellers’ sons came back from the war. For three years Air Force fighter pilot Larry has been registered missing – or dead, depending on who you ask, because Kate Keller is still hoping that her son will come back. When Chris surprises everyone by bringing home Ann, his missing brother’s fiancée and the daughter of his father’s convicted former business partner, no stone is left unturned. The past catches up with the Kellers and a whole edifice of silence and lies collapses.  

»All My Sons«, first premiered in 1947, marked Arthur Miller’s breakthrough as a playwright. He uses a single family as an example to portray a post-war society that has lost all its moral fibre in the pursuit of profit. Due to the compact, precise construction of his plays, critics have repeated compared Miller’s dramatic realism to the dramas of Henrik Ibsen. »All My Sons« is a play about the search for truth and responsibility, an unsparing disclosure of the lie that is lived collectively by an entire society and is as unsettling as a Greek tragedy.   

»This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!«