Neil Cooper's verdict: three stars

If war is a curse, pity the official opening night of Rapture Theatre's new touring revival of Arthur Miller's post World War Two dissection of the business of bad government. Not only was actor Paul Shelley temporarily indisposed from playing the play's pivotal character, Joe Keller, requiring company member David Tarkenter to step into the breach, but midway through Act Two, actress Trudie Goodwin, leading a crucial scene as Joe's self-deluding spouse, Kate, passed out, causing the action to be halted for several minutes before the curtain raised once more.

While both unfortunate incidents made for an understandably uneven evening, they also lent a certain edge to proceedings, so that by the time we get to a funereally played last act, the tension is palpable to all.

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Prior to that, things had started off in a wonderfully sunny American suburbia, where Joe and Kate's forced niceties barely hide how Kate pines for her pilot son, who went missing in action three years before. With surviving offspring Chris hitting on Larry’s former girl Annie, daughter of Joe's former business partner, Steve, who took the rap for offloading some dodgy airplane parts while Joe went free.

Miller's timebomb of a play put families at war in a way that saw them caught in the crossfire of warped capitalism and downright lies that the American Dream was built on. Plus ca change in Emans' brooding production, in which Tarkenter and Goodwin both prove themselves heroic in a timely revival that can't help but point up how the real war criminals get away with mass murder while the little guy becomes the people's patsy.