There is nothing revolutionary about Howard Davies's production of All My Sons.

There is plenty that's incendiary. Arthur Miller's 1947 play pivots on secrecy in a postwar American family. Joe Keller, a businessman and solid pater familias, once supplied faulty parts to the US airforce. Men died as a consequence and Keller's business partner has been jailed; the couple's son went missing on service. The subject has always resonated; it does so now, many dodgy arms deals later. At the centre, David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker are subtle concealers, powerful slow burners. Davies directs the action with unflickering concentration, so that it has the excitement of a thriller. Which is how Miller - not earning his reputation as a worthy moraliser here - structured the plot. There are feints and false leads on the way to exposure: Keller has been accused of the crime and exonerated; his motives are not merely venal. The truth comes out only through a momentary slip by his wife, seized on by a gimlet-eyed lawyer. It's 10 years since Davies first staged All My Sons (with a shrewd and crumpled Julie Walters and startlingly real grass) at the National. Once again, he brings to the play his particular gift for documentary exactness. Although Mark Henderson's lighting over-oranges the action, giving it a microwave glow, William Dudley's design is so sturdily traditional it is almost threatening. The timbered house with its veranda, the garden with its weeping willows and roses, the jug of iced drink are as calm and inviting as they might be in a horror story. This saturated realism may seem to be the default mode for All My Sons, which had its origins in a real-life incident. Still, there's another strand to the play: a visionary, apocalyptic element that was brought to the fore in last year's Broadway production by Simon McBurney, which perched fragments of a household in front of a giant screen showing war footage. Miller himself once seemed to urge a radical approach, when he talked of the "stranglehold of naturalism" that had gripped productions of his work. Davies deals with that. The evening opens with one of the most ferocious of stage storms. Thunder bellows, lightning jags, trees swish. And caught in the middle is Wanamaker, pale and distraught, looking as if she's been gusted there by the wind. It's a picture of wildness which imprints itself on the restraint and secrecy that follow. Claire Hackett is vibrant as a juicy and sceptical neighbour. But it is Suchet and Wanamaker who make the evening fly. He is foxy and affable, convincing both as sharp businessman and warm husband. She looks grey in the face, sometimes sagging with settled grief, sometimes disconcertingly perky. When a final tragedy strikes, sadness and relief meet in her face and create an extraordinary closing moment.

The Observer

Howard Davies' National Theatre revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons ten years ago was pretty good, but he goes one better at the Apollo, where David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker are the perfect pairing as Joe and Kate Keller, an all-American, late middle-aged couple living with the ghosts of the Second World War in their own back yard.

It was once said that "cover-up" is the great theme of American drama, and Miller's 1947 play, which established his reputation and is now hailed by some - David Mamet, for instance - as his true masterpiece, contains the mother of all cover-ups. Joe was an ambitious manufacturer of household and industrial goods in the war - including a batch of faulty cylinder heads that caused the death of 21 pilots. Did he know about the fault before shipment?

One of the war dead is his own son but, of course, they are all his sons really. Joe's business partner took the rap and is still serving a prison sentence, while the partner's daughter, Ann Deever, is about to marry Joe's second son, Chris. But when Ann's lawyer brother turns up with yet more damning evidence, a blot of shame spreads unstoppably through the household.

The anxiety that all of our families shared during the last war, and some still do today, has never been better expressed. Wanamaker, her long face taut as a mask, her voice cracked with pent-up emotion, simply cannot countenance the fact that Larry has gone. And, as in the NT Cottesloe, Davies establishes a tragic tone with an invented prologue of the wind howling through William Dudley's densely forested garden.

The Cottesloe version was a traverse production, and Julie Walters inflected Kate's grief through her own smart brand of sly humour. There's no such equivocation with Wanamaker, who's wringing our withers before she even opens her mouth. Joe on that occasion was the late James Hazeldine and he was, in the best sense, an ordinary Joe, the small businessman making good in the new market place of pressure cookers and washing machines.

Suchet brings much more weight, as well as shiftiness, to the role, and the evening winds up with a tension that's almost unbearable. For this really is the shattering of the American dream. The crux of it all is the outstanding performance of Stephen Campbell Moore as the second son, who becomes the transparent conscience of the play, and he's brilliantly partnered by Jemima Rooper as the hopeful but finally devastated fiancée.

Jerusalem was always going to be a hard act to follow on the Apollo stage, but the West End has now done Arthur Miller much more than proud: this is a truly magnificent revival.

What'sOnStage.com

Sometimes cavilling criticism must fall silent and this is one such occasion.

Over the years I have sometimes denigrated Arthur Miller, the self proclaimed "impatient moralist" who often delivers his message like a preacher in his pulpit.

After watching Howard Davies's magnificent revival of All My Sons (1947), however, such carping seems like a mouse squeaking at a mighty giant.

This is a play of extraordinary power and emotional depth, and when it is performed as wonderfully as it is here, Miller's theme of man's responsibility towards his fellow men feels genuinely noble rather than merely didactic.

It is also urgently topical. Watching this story of a manufacturer who condemned 21 young pilots to their deaths in the Second World War by knowingly supplying their planes with faulty cylinder heads, one can't help but be reminded of allegations that our Forces in Afghanistan have been inadequately equipped by the Government.

In the present climate of political optimism and honesty, one feels David Cameron should insist that his entire Cabinet sees this play, and be reminded with such thrilling dramatic force that truth matters, and deceit has terrible consequences.

But I'm in danger of making the show sound worthy, when in fact it exerts the hypnotic force of a first-rate thriller as the noose of truth slowly tightens on its tragic hero, Joe Keller. There is the inevitability of Greek tragedy about All My Sons, but it also elicits gasps of surprise from the audience as the truth slowly emerges.

It is also profoundly moving. Last night I even spotted a hardened fellow critic weeping.

Davies creates an atmosphere of ominous unease right from the start, with a thrilling storm scene on William Dudley's beautifully realised garden design, complete with real grass and great fronds of willows.

We are in the backyard of the Kellers, one of whose sons went missing in the Second World War and whose surviving boy, Chris, now wants to marry his brother's former sweetheart.

His mother is implacably opposed to the marriage, refusing to believe, three years on, that her beloved Larry is dead. If she admits that, she will have to admit a great deal more.

The superbly constructed plot progresses inexorably and the play is brilliantly persuasive on the way the human mind and heart can know a dark truth and yet still somehow deny it.

The great David Suchet has never been better than he is here as the initially jovial Joe Keller, who seems to shrink within his own body as the chickens come home to roost.

His gathering desperation and guilt is at times almost too painful to watch.

Zoë Wanamaker is also outstanding as his wife, clenched with grief and driven almost mad by the lie on which her life is based, and there is terrific support from Stephen Campbell Moore as the honourable surviving son and Jemima Rooper as the girlfriend who delivers the coup de grace.

This is a stunning production of a modern classic and one that those who see it will never forget.

The Daily Telegraph

I was slightly grudging in my praise when Howard Davies first directed Arthur Miller's 1947 play at the National 10 years ago. Now Davies has recreated his production, with a new cast, and it is time to bring out the superlatives. Not only is the acting tremendous and every visual detail precise, Davies also makes you realise Miller's play is a portrait of a society as well as of a flawed individual.

His hero, Joe Keller, is a thriving businessman who reveres the twin American gods: family and profit. That, ultimately, is his justification for his wartime action of allowing defective parts to be fitted to air force planes, and letting his former partner take the rap. But, in the course of a single day, Joe is confronted by the consequences of his moral abdication. One son, Larry, died three years ago in the war. And when the other son, Chris, decides to marry his dead brother's fiancee, both Joe and his wife, Kate, realise that the lies by which they have lived are destined to be exposed.

You could quarrel with Miller's occasional melodramatic touches, in particular the fiancee's revelation of a crucial letter she has kept hidden for three years. But the power of the production lies in the stripping away of protective illusion.

David Suchet's superb Joe is a man who conceals his guilt under a backyard bonhomie. He joshes his neighbours, lands mock punches on his loved ones' faces, and plays the beaming, pipe-smoking patriarch. But, confronted by the truth of his past, Suchet shrivels before our eyes. It is as if the values by which he lives have been stripped bare along with the man himself.

Zoe Wanamaker is no less astonishing as Joe's wife. She is as swathed in pretence as her husband, but the difference is that she knows it. Wanamaker brilliantly allows you to glimpse the vehemence that underlies the bursts of suburban gaiety and charm. As the crisis comes to a head, she emits cries of despair which wrench the soul.

There is fine support from Stephen Campbell Moore as the impossibly idealistic surviving son, and from Jemima Rooper as the tenacious fiancee. Steven Elder lends weight to a neighbouring doctor who sacrificed his happiness and admits "now I live in the usual darkness". William Dudley's two-storied set is immaculate in its domestic detail; and when the surrounding trees shiver and tremble at the start, it is as if All My Sons picks up where the previous and equally impressive occupant of this theatre, Jerusalem, left off.

The Guardian

You won't find better performances in the West End right now than those of David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker in Howard Davies's meaty, satisfying production of this 1947 Arthur Miller play.

Suchet is Joe Keller, an ordinary man with one excruciating flaw. He's materially comfortable, but his security is the result of canny dealings during the Second World War, and there's a nagging suspicion that the facade of respectability he's erected is just one good nudge away from collapsing.

Wanamaker is Joe's wife Kate. Tormented by the disappearance of their son Larry, who was reported missing in action in the war, she insists he is still alive, investing her faith in the restorative power of cosmic energies. "Laugh, but there are meanings in such things," she tells the sceptics - she's a woman of "uncontrolled inspirations".

Miller's play suggests the impossibility of blotting out the past. It begins amid the norms of suburban life - the Kellers' verdant backyard - then throws their apparent equilibrium into disarray as secrets surface from the depths of their carefully contrived oblivion. During the war Joe shipped defective airplane parts from his father's factory, and 21 pilots died as a result. He's shrouded the unpleasant facts in a personal myth that neatly sustains his innocence.

Of all Miller's plays, this one throbs most strongly with the influence of Ibsen. It compellingly charts the relationship between actions and their morbid psychological causes, and there's a note of Nordic mysticism beneath its richly furbished reality. Davies's production has a rousing sense of scale and is studded with telling details. William Dudley's design is atmospheric, and Paul Groothuis's sound evocative.

There's excellent work from Stephen Campbell Moore as Joe's affectionate, attentive son Chris, and from Jemima Rooper, warm and twinkly but soulful as Ann, his brother's one-time lover and the woman he now aspires to marry. Wanamaker is husky, poised and poignant, a model of tortured seriousness.

It's Suchet, though, who dominates. He invests Joe with a lovely geniality, yet also with gravitas and a wounded, anxious manliness. Every nuance of his performance feels perfectly weighted: he can even make holding a pipe in his mouth a densely expressive gesture. All My Sons is a heavyweight drama - moralistic, well-made and perhaps a little too obvious in its tragic design. It's not exactly summer blockbuster material, but it is as potent a production of Miller's work as one could hope to see.

The Evening Standard

"Will you stop talking like a civics book," growls one of the characters in Arthur Miller's 1947 play All My Sons.

People who don't like this dramatist argue that that is precisely what Miller himself can't resist doing. It's true that there are moments when the themes - the penalties of denial and of putting self and family before the collective good - are spelt out too insistently. But watching Howard Davies's emotionally searching, expertly acted revival, you're persuaded that this is a small price to pay for the play's fierce moral fervour and the psychological penetration of its insights.

This is the second time that Davies has tackled All My Sons. This new staging revisits and revamps the approach taken by his award-laden version at the National Theatre a decade ago. Once again, he opens the proceedings with an extra scene which dramatises the storm in which lightning prophetically fells the tree that had been planted to mark the birth of the son who went missing in action in the Second World War. As she fearfully prowls the terrace of their imposing white clapboard house, this calamity is witnessed by the insomniac Kate, the mother who, three years on, still cannot bring herself to believe her boy is dead. Zoë Wanamaker is superlative in the role, showing you a woman who is a heartbreaking and deeply unnerving mix of agitated neurosis and indomitable will.

David Suchet is on magnificent form as Joe Keller, the man who, under pressure of wartime production, knowingly sold defective cylinder heads to the American airforce, thus sending 21 young pilots crashing to their deaths. Suchet effortlessly commands the stage, his guilt superficially buried under the rabbit-punching swagger and slightly strained bonhomie.

Ethically, the surviving son is right to condemn him. But Stephen Campbell Moore, in a finely judged performance, lets you see, as well as the principled idealism, the aggrieved priggishness of a youth who affects to despise his father's soiled money without decisively renouncing it. Miller's Ibsenite plot occasionally creaks and is marred by certain implausibilities; but while it lasts, you are swept up by the production's splendid self-conviction.

The Independant