As one of them embarks on a romance with Catherine, Eddie's envy and delusion plays out with devastating consequences.
But the routine of his life is interrupted when Beatrice's cousins, illegal immigrants from Italy, arrive in New York. Set in the 1950s on the gritty Brooklyn waterfront, A View from the Bridge follows the cataclysmic downfall of Eddie Carbone, who spends his days as a hardworking longshoreman and his nights at home with his wife, Beatrice, and orphan niece, Catherine. We are all of us caught, rapt and culpable, in its spray.Winner of the 2016 Tony Awards for Best Revival of a Play and Best Direction of a Play: Ivo van Hove. The shower that opens the play, Eddie’s ablutions after a sweaty day on the docks, is echoed in the bloody rain that concludes it, suggesting that the violence that propels the play is inexorable.
But pronunciation aside, they’re all very much in the same play and very much entrapped in what Van Hove, following on from Miller, envisions as a supremely tragic cycle. Strong is well supported by the other cast members, though accents can waver between south Brooklyn and north London. Maybe that first kiss seems out of character for Eddie, but Miller’s play acknowledges that “a passion” “had moved into his body, like a stranger”, and in Mark Strong’s extraordinary and visceral performance we see a man who has become a stranger to himself, a paragon of manhood unmanned and set adrift both by his own desires and by challenges to his masculine assumptions. And if Van Hove adjoins a kiss that is not in Miller’s play, it makes the scripted one that follows it all the more disturbing. Van Hove shows us the too-long embraces between Eddie and Catherine, her childish way of wrapping her legs around his waist that doesn’t seem so childish any more. Russell Tovey, Fox and Strong: ‘Van Hove inflames what had come to seem a settled text.’ Photograph: Jan Versweyveld/Supplied But Rodolpho, who sings and dances and sews, discomfits Eddie, especially when Rodolpho fixes his attentions on Catherine. Marco is a macho sort, so he and Eddie get along fine. Conflict arrives in the bodies of Marco (Michael Zegen) and Rodolpho (Russell Tovey), Beatrice’s cousins, newly smuggled ashore from Italy. But in Ivo van Hove’s thrillingly claustrophobic version, last seen on the West End, the action all takes place in one small square – a bit like a boxing ring, a bit like a prison cell – with the audience surrounding it on three sides.Ī View from the Bridge, based loosely on a real-life incident, describes the upheaval in the home of Eddie Carbone ( Mark Strong), a career longshoreman who lives with his wife, Beatrice (Nicola Walker), and her niece, Catherine (Phoebe Fox), who has just been offered a secretarial job when the play begins. O stensibly, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge is set in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a thriving port in Miller’s day and now home to troubled housing projects and hipster bakeries.
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