A View from the Bridge

by Arthur Miller

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 27 March 2015

The play, transferred from the Young Vic, is directed by Ivo van Hove with Mark Strong as Eddie Carbone, Nicola Walker as his wife Beatrice, Phoebe Fox as his niece Catherine, Luke Norris as her fiance Rodolpho, Emun Elliott as Rodolpho's brother Marco, and Michael Gould as the lawyer Alfieri.

Miller's tense drama from 1955, revised in 1956, is here stripped of almost all realistic reference to reveal its strong affiliation with Greek tragedy. The set is a bare space made almost like a shallow pit through being surrounded on all four sides by a low-level boundary which can be used as benches or to signify the enclosing walls of a room. At the back is a wall with a single entrance cut in its centre leading to a black space behind.

Having seen van Hove's production of 'Antigone' only the night before, it was remarkable to see so many elements of design, both aural and visual, used again in a different context but to equal if not even more powerful effect. With virtually no props, the surface reality of working class Brooklyn, seedy and dangerous, is downplayed to reveal the central complexity of Eddie's emotional life, unexamined and almost completely unarticulated by him, but causing waves of trouble and eventual disaster for those around him. 

The opening chords of Faure's Requiem herald a sense of doom, but are immediately and brilliantly allowed to fade into the background booming of ships' horns, a subtle reminder of the setting of the play which at the same time nags at the consciousness with a more insistent sense of impending tragedy than the rather clumsy 'voiceover' comments of the lawyer Alfieri, who has to move somewhat awkwardly between setting the scene as if in reminiscence, and playing a minor role in its development.

Mark Strong is outstanding as Eddie, giving a performance of raw power, fury and distress. Eddie's fierce over-protectiveness of his niece is presented as misguided but not malevolent, yet to modern eyes there is an all too clear possibility of paedophiliac abuse. The sheer unspokenness of such things at the time allows for a considerable ambiguity until a crisis is reached, at which point there is a real shock as Eddie tries to justify his unease at Catherine's choice of a husband by a wholly inappropriate act on his part, first towards Catherine herself and then towards Rodolpho. 

The supporting cast is also excellent, handling the shifts from ordinary domestic squabbles and rivalries to moments of extreme tension and foreboding with no sign of strain. In one scene, where Eddie and Marco turn their growing antagonism into a trial of physical strength, the tensions are first revealed in ordinary conversation rendered threatening by excruciating Pinter-like pauses, followed by a challenge to lift a chair with one hand. The chair on stage is a simple wooden one, which anyone could lift, but it is made to seem impossibly heavy simply by the actors' effort and the crashing return of the Faure chords. 

Eddie, a far less admirable character than John Proctor in 'The Crucible', is nevertheless another Miller protagonist whose sense of self is fatefully bound up with his regard for reputation, or, as they both put it when under stress, 'my name'. Whereas Proctor resigns himself to execution rather than sully his name by saving himself, Eddie charges into destructive conflict in an attempt to exonerate the name he sees as already besmirched by others - failing utterly to see his own complicity in the process. It is a mark of the strength of Miller's vision, and the stunning power of this production in particular, that we can feel so much sympathy for this imperfect man, recognising amidst the damage he has caused that he himself is so cripplingly damaged as well.