Dominic West gives a superb performance in A View from the Bridge — review

The great tragedy of A View from the Bridge is that lurking behind Arthur Miller’s searing play is a happier story: one in which 1950s longshoreman Eddie Carbone welcomes his wife’s Sicilian cousins to Brooklyn and delights in the love that springs up between one of the men, Rodolpho, and his niece Catherine. But economic circumstance, deep cultural conditioning and catastrophic personal flaws mean that can never be. The tension between what is and what could have been drives the play and is made visible at every beat in Lindsay Posner’s beautifully judged, crystal-clear new production.

We see it in Dominic West’s superb Eddie, eyes like bullets, face like thunder, as he wrestles with feelings for his niece that he dare not even articulate and has no idea how to control. We see it too in Kate Fleetwood’s excellent Beatrice, the lines of her drawn face tightening as she struggles in vain to impress on her husband the folly of his attachment. And we see it in Pierro Niel-Mee’s fine Marco, a man, like Eddie, forged in a grimly patriarchal society with a strict understanding of what a man is, and baffled and bruised by the hand life has dealt him.  

It’s an old-fashioned production in many respects, plainly staged in period costumes on Peter McKintosh’s flexible wooden set. But Posner wisely trusts Miller and the cast to scope out the psychological depths of the characters. And while his staging remains pinned, resolutely, in 1950s Brooklyn, this story of immigrants, the desperate conditions that drive them and the suspicions that greet their arrival, feels all too timely. There’s a constant sense of being watched, of a society riven with resentment and hostility and a visceral need to belong. When the dam finally breaks and the violence that has been simmering erupts, what Eddie bellows at the world is “I want my respect.”

That’s a cry that we still recognise: that perplexed sense of being cheated. West deftly allies it here with a tragic study in fragile masculinity. His Eddie is at base an amiable, solid sort: a man who has felt certain of himself but who cannot handle losing control, cannot admit that his feelings have become wrong, cannot stomach that his code has let him down and that what he sees in Nia Towle’s lovely, hopeful Catherine and Callum Scott Howells’ funny, charming Rodolpho is the future. 

It’s not a revelatory staging, as was Ivo van Hove’s groundbreaking production a decade ago, and it does fall foul of the melodramatic creakiness of some of the plot twists. But few playwrights can match Miller’s ability to combine astute political analysis with poignant humanity and, flaws and all, this richly acted production still hits home.

★★★★☆ 

To August 3, trh.co.uk