DAMIAN Cruden chalks up another first with his production of All My Sons.

Last time it was his first Studio show at York Theatre Royal - and a particularly fine production of Frankie And Johnny In The Clair de Lune it was too - and now the theatre's artistic director is directing his first Arthur Miller play.

All My Sons opens tonight in its first York staging since Tim Supple's 1986 production. "The one I had on the top of my list to do was Broken Glass, which I was going to do a year ago but for various reasons I didn't," Damian says. "However, All My Sons was Miller's first successful play - it was his ninth play but the first to be a success in terms of being an award winner - and so it's interesting to start at the beginning of that success story and work from there."

Based on a true story, All My Sons was premiered in 1947: a timely tale of Second World War expediency that turned the cosy, small-town world of the Keller family on its head.

"It seems to me that his plays never date, and that's because he's always looking at the relationship between the personal, the private and the public on all sorts of different levels," says Damian.

"In All My Sons it's very much a domestic setting, a relationship between a father and son and a mother and her lost son, but on the other side of that, the play is very much about how young people see themselves in their engagement with the world and how parents see their children's place in the world, and the difference between the two."

The play has a very precise period setting in late 1947, post Depression, post war. "Yet All My Sons is full of universal truths, so you can relate current situations to parts of the play or all of it," says Damian. "It's also a play that deals with grief, which is the inevitable consequence of war, and at a time when we're standing on the edge of conflict, it is apposite to look at that impact."

All My Sons, York Theatre Royal, until November 23. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 09:49 Friday, November 01, 2002