Theatre review: A View From The Bridge

It's ten years since Ivo van Hove's production of A View From The Bridge not only made a star of the Belgian director in London and New York, but also tangibly influenced the way a lot of theatre has been approached since then. It feels a lot more recent than a decade, but then all that influence is probably part of that (along with the fact that I have seen it a bit more recently than that, as a streamed recording during lockdown.) So in some respects it probably is time for someone to revisit Arthur Miller's domestic tragedy as a whole new generation can see it with fresh eyes; but for many of us it'll be slightly odd to see a production that keeps the original details and trappings of post-War New York, where Italian-American families live under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and work - when they can find work - loading and unloading ships on the docks.

Still, their situation is better than that of many Sicilians back home whose families are literally starving: The police come down hard on illegal immigrants, but many families in the neighbourhood are willing to take in distant relatives who come over to make better money, and keeping everyone's secrets is a matter of honour.

Eddie Carbone (Dominic West) and his wife Bea (Kate Fleetwood) have already raised their orphaned niece Catherine (Nia Towle) as their own daughter, and now Bea's cousins are arriving from Sicily to stay in their apartment. The older, Marco (Pierro Niel-Mee) has a wife and three kids he wants to support and return to, but the younger Rodolpho (Callum Scott Howells) is single, charming and wants to stay in America. With sparks immediately flying between him and Catherine, Eddie's latent quasi-incestuous feelings towards his niece come to the fore, and he develops an obsessive hatred of Rodolpho.

Lindsay Posner's production, on Peter McKintosh's gloomy wooden set, isn't full of technical flourish but is interesting nonetheless, particularly in terms of character: As my first encounter with Eddie was in Mark Strong's instantly powerful, intimidating figure, it's interesting to see West play him as someone who never was quite as imposing as he might have thought. Here his revelation, particularly in the strange competition of strength between him and Marco that ends the first act, isn't of an older Alpha male being challenged by the next generation, but of someone who was never as Alpha as he thought in the first place.

That level of questioning his reality makes sense of quite how many directions his paranoid breakdown goes in: Triggered by sexual jealousy over Catherine that everyone except him can see clearly, he justifies it to himself by theorising that Rodolpho only wants to marry her for a Green Card, which then spirals into an obsession with the idea that he must be gay (he's blond, can sing and cook, that's essentially hard evidence.) The only surprising thing is that he doesn't accuse him of being a vampire, seeing as Howells' Italian accent comes by way of Transylvania.

"One jazz record! Two jazz records! Three jazz records! Ah-ah!"

Fleetwood and Towle give us heartbreaking takes of women showing deference in a man's world and still having it thrown into their faces when they have a thought of their own, but the ultimate figure of helplessness is the lawyer Alfieri, who also narrates the story. Martin Marquez gives us a man who understands the very masculine and Italian world of honour and pride the story takes place in, but is also very much a man of the law, and ultimately has to put his hands up and say the law doesn't deal with emotions, hunches and grudges, but can only step in when it's already too late and things have reached a violent conclusion. I liked a late scene between Marquez and Niel-Mee that shows how much Marco's situation - which has much more tangible cause than Eddie's earlier rants - mirrors that of Eddie as far as the law is concerned.

I was intrigued to see a more traditional View From The Bridge but was braced for being underwhelmed in comparison, so I was pleasantly surprised by Posner's version. It's not reinventing the wheel so is unlikely to redefine the way theatre's made for the next decade, but where van Hove's production made the case for the epic, ominous universality of the story, this one is better at focusing on its specific conflict of grand timeless emotions in a world of very human and concrete laws, and how the clash of the two can lead to tragedy.

A View From The Bridge by Arthur Miller is booking until the 3rd of August at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.