The Man Who Had All The Luck

The Lowry
Tuesday 8th – Saturday 12th April 2008

This donmar production of celebrated author Arthur Miller’s first play, The Man Who Had All The Luck is poignant, engaging and incredibly intimate. Miller’s fable questions the un-touchable concept of fate and explores how it is that one man can fail in life, while another, no more or less capable, can achieve glory in his.

The simply constructed scenery reveals the setting as a small, rural American town. The action centres on David Beeves, a man who seems to succeed in all that he does in life.  His luck first manifests itself by the death of his childhood sweetheart’s father. He had stood in the way of the couples impending marriage, yet when he is ran down and killed by the local mink farmer, they are free to marry when they wish. When David, a self-taught mechanic, struggles to fix a Marmount roadster that will eventually lead to a wealth of business for him, in enters Gus, an Austrian mechanic who subsequently fixes it for him. Over the span of three years, David’s luck continues undiminished; his car-repair business prospers, his gas-station is fortunate enough to have a highway built along-side it, and his life with wife Hester is happy. 

However, for David’s brother, Amos, life is the complete opposite. He is a man with no luck. Groomed by their father for baseball stardom, Amos has trained fanatically to the neglect of any other skill. After rejection by a baseball scout, he is reduced to the status of a blubbering child;  a scene that was slightly over-acted by Felix Scott.

Despite the lives of all those around him beginning to crumble, David’s good fortune never ceases. By the final act he becomes obsessed with it, he tortures himself with the belief that all luck must pay a price, he therefore waits with dread for something terrible to happen.

This production questions fate, luck and good fortune. Despite a quite repetitive structure, the intimacy of this play allowed the audience to really engage with the characters. All were clearly identified on stage and each had their own story of bad luck to be compared with that of David’s good luck. This is definitely one for all those that believe their life is guided by destiny.

9/10