Bryan Cranston is ‘magnificent’ in Ivo van Hove’s stunning revival

The last time Bryan Cranston teamed up with Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove – for “Network” at the National Theatre, then Broadway – it bagged the “Breaking Bad” star Olivier and Tony awards for best actor. “Only a fool would bet against a repeat triumph now,” said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper. I have never seen a better production of “All My Sons”, Arthur Miller’s 1947 classic about a toxic filial inheritance, and the rotten heart of the American dream. In this stunning new production, playing at just over two hours without an interval, the drama assumes the “grim yet towering momentum, inexorability and universality of a Greek tragedy”. Cranston, as Joe Keller, gives a “magnificent performance of craggy, rugged resilience tempered with affability”.

Cranston and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, playing his wife Kate, are “pitch perfect” as a couple “shutting out unbearable wartime truths”, said Nick Curtis in London’s The Standard. Their son, Larry, a pilot, has been missing in action for three years, while Joe’s business partner has been convicted of supplying defective equipment that cost pilots’ lives. Hayley Squires lends a “quiet gravitas” to Ann, Larry’s former girlfriend. But for all the first-rate acting on show, the performance “you walk out talking about” is that of Paapa Essiedu as the Kellers’ surviving son Chris, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. His “ascent from affable shrugs to righteous rants is plausible, compelling, freshly minted”.

It’s rare to see a group of actors “this brilliant gel so completely”, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. And the symbolist sparseness of Jan Versweyveld’s set design “drives the production further into the realm of the epic and timeless”. An old felled tree lies across the stage in the opening scene, while the Kellers’ house has a strange circular window that also transforms into something more elemental – variously the Sun and the Moon. There is “so much alchemy” in this dazzling production. “Every scene is strong, no actor stealing the show, each raising the power of the ensemble as a whole.”

Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2. Until 7 March

by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

“Between early May and early July of this year, much of Australia’s collective imagination was absorbed by the trial of Erin Patterson,” said Jason Steger in the Financial Times.

The 51-year-old stood accused of murdering her estranged husband’s parents, along with one of his aunts, by serving them a beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms. Patterson was also charged with the attempted murder of the aunt’s husband, who narrowly survived.

Among those present throughout the trial, which ended in Patterson’s conviction, were the writers and long-time friends Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. Thinking they might make a podcast, they recorded their conversations on their drives to and from the courthouse near Leongatha, the small town in Victoria where “the deadly dish was served”. The podcast didn’t materialise. Instead, what we have is this “hybrid”, which splices their transcribed conversations with passages written in their collective voice. While many might have preferred a “full account” written by any one of the three, this is a compelling book with “pace and staying power”.

In a media ecosystem glutted with “murdertainment”, there are precious few works of true crime that don’t “make you feel scummy”, said Sarah Ditum in The Times. But “The Mushroom Tapes”, with its “self-questioning about the ethics of its own project”, proves an exception.

The “fascination” the authors feel stems largely from Patterson’s “seeming normalcy”. What led this apparently unremarkable woman to “poison four people, none of whom she had any obvious reason to want dead”? A “true-crime buff” whose closest friendships were with a group of fellow murder obsessives, Patterson planned her crime meticulously, “from foraging for the death caps to the recipe for beef wellington to the fatal dose required”. But in other ways she was “ludicrously sloppy” – failing, for instance, to come up with a “convincing story about where the mushrooms came from”.

“‘The Mushroom Tapes’ offers two spectacles in one,” said Owen Richardson in The Sydney Morning Herald: “the Patterson trial, and famous writers hanging out together”. Although at times there is too much “self-conscious significance hunting” – “the mushroom metaphors sprout like mushrooms” – the authors are “sensitive and insightful” observers. But in the end, they’re defeated by the “black box that is Erin Patterson”. “I felt that the joke was on us,” said Hooper. “We thought we were going to get Medea and it was actually Karen.”

The ‘ordinary woman’ who became Victims Commissioner

Baroness Newlove was, in her own words, just an “ordinary woman” from Warrington when she was propelled into the public eye by the savage murder of her husband Garry in 2007. A central heating engineer turned salesman, Garry had been at home on a summer evening when some local youths, high on drink and drugs, started vandalising their car. He rushed outside, in his bare feet, only to be surrounded, knocked to the floor and kicked in the head “like a football”, in front of their three daughters. He died 36 hours later. The Newloves and their neighbours had been very worried by the growing menace of antisocial behaviour in their once tranquil neighbourhood, said The Telegraph; but meetings with police had got nowhere. Helen Newlove recalled predicting that nothing would be done until someone was killed. Following the conviction of three teenagers for murder, she gave a powerful speech in which she urged parents and politicians to do more to combat youth violence. 

A few months later, she founded an organisation, Newlove Warrington, to provide activities for youngsters; she also campaigned for measures to tackle antisocial behaviour. She had a meeting with Jack Straw, then the justice minister; but she got on better with David Cameron, who made her a life peer shortly after the Tories took office in 2010. On her first day in the House of Lords, she felt like “Hilda Ogden”, she said. Born in Salford, she had been a studious pupil at school, but had left at 16 to work in a chip shop, and had later worked as a court typist and court assistant.

She didn’t think she’d fit in in the Lords. She wanted to say to her fellow peers: “I’m Helen from the North and I live in a council house.” In fact, she fitted in very well; and in 2018 she was made deputy speaker. “Women are like teabags,” she would say. “You never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.” Before that, though, Cameron had suggested she apply for the vacant role of Victims Commissioner. She duly did so – only to find that she had no staff, and no office. She accused the PM of making the role up on the “back of a cigarette packet”, and fought for it to be properly resourced. In the next few years, she worked hard to produce reports that would lead to action, not just sit gathering dust on the shelves, said The Guardian. Her achievements include the help and safeguards for crime victims contained in the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024. 

She was appointed pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Bolton in 2019; on “Desert Island Discs”, she asked for “War and Peace” as her book, and lipstick as her luxury. She was appointed to serve a third term as Victims Commissioner in 2019; it was due to run until this year. She is survived by her second husband, whom she’d married in 2012, and her three daughters with Garry.