There have been plenty of Arthur Miller revivals this year – to mark his centenary – but young company End of the Moving Walkway take us back to his first professionally produced play. ‘The Man Who Had All the Luck’ tells the story of David (Jamie Chandler), an affable, generous, hard-workin’ and good-lookin’ self-taught mechanic living in a small Midwestern town in the early 1940s. Yet the way everything goes right for him seems unfair, both to David and to those around him.
The questions asked by Miller are dramatically ripe: is there such a thing as luck – and does it come to those who deserve it? How does it feel to succeed while those you love flounder? David has a serious (and seriously un-American) guilt complex. This, perhaps, is his un-luck: he’s too tormented to appreciate his good fortune.
The play is over-cooked: while Miller identified interesting themes, he tends to ram them home. This production indulges the script, and the first half feels overlong. Nonetheless, there are many moments when the taut plotting grips, and Paul Lichtenstern’s firm direction delivers a sense of the high-stakes situations characters consider themselves in (although I longed to switch off the tinkly piano music piped in at emotional moments). That classic Miller-ish tug – between the hope of ambition and the despair of failure – is first felt here.
Performances are solid, with Chloe Walshe notable as David’s wife Hester (the only woman in this masculine play), emotions brightening or darkening her face like scudding clouds. It’s simply staged, with audience on three sides, and little set – although there’s a slightly strange decision to lay a giant printout of the final page of the script across the stage floor. It’s a spoiler – if you’re close enough to make it out – at odds with the otherwise naturalistic style.
BY: HOLLY WILLIAMS