A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. Tour to 7 December.

Tour

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
by Arthur Miller

The Touring Consortium on tour to 7 December 2002
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 9 October at Oxford Playhouse

Vividly-performed revival of Miller's American longshore tragedy.We might get a view from Brooklyn Bridge but for longshoremen like Eddie Carbone working the docks, life's built close round the waterfront, a tight community where local loyalties play against personal passions in Kenny Ireland's finely-drawn production.

It's the play where Arthur Miller parted company with his regular director Elia Kazan, as American critic Eric Bentley noted. Called by the McCarthyite witchhunt into US Communism, Kazan named names and went on to direct Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, a vindication of whistle-blowing. Miller kept silent and wrote this play, which takes a more disenchanted view of grassing-up.

Saul Radomsky's set places the Carbone living-room raised and distant. There's some loss of intimacy but it allows space close-up to the audience for Eddie's two visits to lawyer Alfieri. This, and the contrast between Benny Young's calm, smart lawyer and Robert Gwilym's shuffling, awkward docker throws focus on Eddie's dilemma: every reason that makes him feel justified in hating Rodolpho is dismissed. The only legal hold he can have is the young man's illegal immigrant status, and snitching on that breaks every code.

Behind it all is Eddie's relation with his orphaned niece Catherine, whom he's brought up with what's increasingly an over-protection calling into question his unspoken, unacknowledged feeling for her. Gwilym's contained power, his struggle to cope with uncomprehended emotions comes out in restless physicality, unstoppable as steam rising off hot metal. It's partnered by Katherine Holme's mix of childlike eagerness to please and joyous hope for her emerging adulthood to take up a job, to be with the handsome Italian sneaked into the country and living at the Carbones.

Ireland places every element with precision, charting the destructive impulses through Sorcha Cusack's journey as Eddie's wife from happiness through trouble to anguish and defeat. To keep her home she has to obey Eddie's boycott of Catherine's wedding, glammed-up yet defeated on her niece's wedding day. And Matthew Flynn makes his chair-lifting an initial challenge, advancing towards Eddie with the furniture raised high, a forecast of his final violent explosion.

With the sudden irruption of waterfront society at Eddie's disgrace it all makes for an intense, gripping revival.

Alfieri: Benny Young
Eddie: Robert Gwilym
Louis/2nd Immigration Officer: Klaus White
Mike: Mark Flitton
Catherine: Katherine Holme
Beatrice: Sorcha Cusack
Marco: Matthew Flynn
Tony/1st Immigration Officer: Edmund Harcourt
Rodolpho: Tadeusz Pasternak
Girl Upstairs: Juliet Warner
Mrs Lipari: Katherine Stark
Mr Lipari: Mark Carlisle

Director: Kenny Ireland
Designer: Saul Radomsky
Lighting: Jeanine Davies
Dialect coach: William Conacher
Fight director: Alison de Burgh

2002-10-10 09:19:03