A View from the Bridge

Review by Kathleen Campion
20 November 2015

The current production of A View From the Bridge at the Lyceum re-thinks and re-imagines one of Arthur Miller's signature plays. If you can get a ticket see it.

The plot is built around Eddie Carbone. A strapping longshoreman on the Redhook docks of the 1950s, Eddie lives with his wife Beatrice, and his 17-year-old niece Catherine, in an Italian-American neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge. When two Italian immigrants, illegals, come to live with the family, Eddie's sexual obsession with Catherine is revealed, and he comes apart.

The buzz around the current production hangs on the inventiveness of director Ivo van Hove. His refinement of the play to essentials, devoid of conventions of costume and set, offers us a truly fresh take on an American classic. The scene is stark and elemental; a grey box rimmed with transparent bench seating all around. It is, in every sense, stripped to basics.

Much has been written about the historical, even liturgical, trappings van Hove gives his production. In the opening scene, two men are seen stripped to the waist, in dim light, bathing themselves, suggesting ritual bathing, perhaps even the dressing of corpses.

The music is a combo of dusty cathedral and primal drums. The stage is a monolith; the actors are barefoot. The unabashed demands of ancient ethics-honor, respect, allegiance (defined in exclusively male terms)-drive the action. The dominant male—breaks the covenant—and reaps the whirlwind.

Eddie is played to heart-breaking and infuriating perfection by Mark Strong. Aptly named, Strong's stature and strength not only inform his character but color much of the staging.

For the women his physical dominance is clear and absolute, shading the sexuality between Eddie and his wife and Eddie and Catherine. In her first entrance and many that follow, Catherine (Phoebe Fox) hurtles into his arms wrapping her bare legs around his waist as he strolls around the stage holding her to him. It appears overtly sexual-until we realize who they are supposed to be to one another. We are almost embarrassed at what we were thinking. Beatrice, played by the remarkably volatile and varied Nicola Walker, stands her tiny self in opposition to Eddie's overpowering blindness to reality. She loves him, but cannot save him. It is her small frame around which he wraps his dying embrace. Nicola Walker has our attention throughout.

For the two young men, both smaller and younger than Eddie, and one of them wanting the girl, the blocking of the actors is all jungle drums. All the rituals of male dominance and submissiveness are represented as they move about the stage.

Marco (Michael Zegen) is riveting in his tensile restraint. He submits because he must in the order of things, until he cannot. Rodolpho (Russell Tovey) wants the girl, so he challenges, then backs off, then challenges again.

Miller wrote us a narrator, Alfieri, a lawyer in this working-class neighborhood, who serves as Greek chorus, bit player, and ultimately gets the last speech, as though Miller worried his audience needed his message reinforced. Michael Gould's Alfieri is a comforting presence as he comes in to occasionally steady the ship.

The cast appeared to be working without mics and with audience seated on stage as well as out front, they were playing to three sides. This may account for the occasional missed word or phrase. If that was true in row G of the orchestra seating, it may be a greater problem in "the gods."

A re-do of such an oft-produced play has to have a driving vision-or why go there? The vision here is raw in the primal sense of the word.

(Kathleen Campion)

"Takes you into extreme emotional territory that you seldom dare visit in daily life. At the end of its uninterrupted two hours, you are wrung out, scooped out and so exhausted that you're wide awake.."
Ben Brantley for New York Times

"Van Hove sees to it that everyone's dripping in guilt."
Joe Dziemianowicz for New York Daily News

"a stunning, imaginative theatrical experience, an impassioned interpretation that really brings the heat to Miller's gripping drama."
Jennifer Farrar for Associated Press

"Both visually gorgeous and an emotional wipeout."
Marilyn Stasio for Variety

External links to full reviews from popular press...

New York Times - New York Daily News - Associated Press - Variety