A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: till 18 Oct Birmingham: till 22 November West Yorkshi

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: Arthur Miller
Birmingham Rep till 18 October: Tkts: 0121 236 4455
West Yorkshire Playhouse 22 October 22 November: Tkts 0113 213 7700

Runs: 2h 30m, one interval
Review: Rod Dungate, 30 September 2003

Fresh, powerful, ironically comic in places: enormously passionate.
It may be one of the worthy main-stays of theatre programming but in a production such as this one by Toby Frow you see, afresh, how good a play Miller's BRIDGE is.

It's almost 50 years old and time has changed the way we view it. We are more relaxed for the most part in our discussions of honour, manhood and manliness, love and sexual attraction than we were in the 1950s: time has not softened Eddie exactly, but we are more knowing. The play now reveals a tentative vein of ironic comedy without being undermined at all.

Central to this production's success is Corey Johnson's sensitive (yes, sensitive) and intelligent portrayal of Eddie. He pulls the character back from being simply a gross bully by ensuring that the glimpses Miller gives us of his soul shine through. This may be when he describes the hold of a coffee-carrying ship as 'smelling like flowers' or when he tells how he's struggled to bring up his family and keep them together. Johnson's is a superbly passionate performance: we cannot doubt for one millisecond this man's conviction. But he is incoherence, he is unable to express himself: his pent up emotion seems, in Johnson's performance, to be actually eating him away from the inside. Death is his only possible release.

Frow has welded his company into a fine team. Abigail McKern's Beatrice (Eddie's wife) is painfully dignified. She suffers all the blows yet is never a doormat: she carries us with her every second. Jonjo O'Neill turns in another of his performances not to be missed. He walks that so-difficult tightrope between naïve feyness and camp and never topples onto the wrong side. His lightness of touch, his delightfully infectious laugh endear him to us, as it endears him to Catherine. Shauna Macdonald brings a lovely shape to Catherine's journey: her character grows in depth as it grows in maturity.

My only qualm is Simon Higlett's design. He raises Eddie's flat and places it upstage using the rest of the acting space as a street with other frontages and fire-escapes. The upside of this is that it looks terrific when characters walk away into the fog and darkness. The downside (which is greater) is that the space restricts the action and, more importantly, we are distanced from the main part of the drama.

And a final word for Malcolm Ransom's fight work. The confrontation between Eddie and Marco is incredibly realistic a real scrap: marvellous work from fight director and the two actors.

Louis: Paul Mohan
Mike: Jonathan Tafler
Alfieri: Richard Durden
Eddie: Corey Johnson
Catherine: Shauna Macdonald
Beatrice: Abigail McKern
Marco: Mido Hamada
Tony/ Immigration Officer: Ian Butcher
Rodolpho: Jonjo O'Neill
Immigration Officer: Chris McGill

Neighbours/ Longshoremen: Edna Cobley, Claire Dean, Angela Ellis, James Harris, Roger Jones, Samantha Merritt, Tim Morgan, Amy Steel, Anthony Stephens, Andy Weeks.

Director: Toby Frow
Design: Simon Higlett
Lighting: Tim Mitchell
Sound: Paul Arditti
Assistant Director: Kate Varney
Casting Director: Siobhan Bracke
Fight Director: Malcolm Ransom
Dialect Coach: Jeanette Nelson
DanceTutor: James Cooper

2003-10-01 21:23:54