NT Education Workpack All My Sons
The play Arthur Miller 2 Background to All My Sons 3 Synopsis 4 Design 4 Themes 5

The play: characters 6

Practical Exercises 8

For Discussion 8

Other related materials 9

All My Sons by Arthur Miller This production opened at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre on 6 July 2000

Director Howard Davies Designer William Dudley Lighting Designer Mark Henderson Music Dominic Muldowney Sound Designer Paul Groothuis

NT Education Royal National Theatre South Bank London SE1 9PX

Workpack written by Christopher Bigsby Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, author of Contemporary American Playwrights, and editor (with Don Wilmeth) of The Cambridge History of American Theatre.

Editor Dinah Wood Coordinator Sarah Nicholson Design Patrick Eley

See www.nt-online.org for further production details

T (020) 7452 3388 F (020) 7452 3380 education@nationaltheatre.org.uk

The play
Arthur Miller Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, New York City, in October 1915. At that time the area was largely Jewish and Italian. His father, who had emigrated from Poland at the age of eight, had built up a sizeable company manufacturing women’s coats. He was the epitome of the American Dream, which proposed that America offered the opportunity to rise from rags to riches, a dream whose material thrust Miller would later question both in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. The family was rich, with an expensive apartment and chauffeur-driven car. They lost much of their money, however, in the Stock Market crash of 1929 and moved to the then less fashionable borough of Brooklyn, just across the river from the tip of Manhattan. The Depression which followed made a deep impression on Miller and echoes throughout his work. Together with the Civil War of the 19th century, it was, he believed, the experience that touched the lives of most Americans. He himself learned that it was possible suddenly to lose everything, a