Review: A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, Chichester Festival Theatre

As is the case for Chichester Festival Theatre itself, this is my Arthur Miller debut. I knew of the reputation, the glasses and Marilyn of course, but not of his work. Sometimes that’s the most advantageous place to start.

We open on a lawyer telling us some background - yes, the audiences of the ancient Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily would be familiar with the motif  - and the exposition plunges us into a world of ancient and modern and not just in the formal construction of the play. We’re told that second generation immigrants from Sicily and the starving south of the Italian peninsula are working on the docks in New York, slowly adopting the American Way, not least its legalistic approach to dispute resolution. But some still cling to the old ways of vendetta and omerta, blood the only salve for lost honour and code of silence respected within and without communities. The two cultures are sliding back and forth across each other and, sometimes, the friction makes sparks fly.

There’s plenty of work and plenty of grift in the post-war booming USA and that attracts migrants to enter the country illegally on the same boats that bring in the coffee and the booze. Two such are Marco, the strong and silent type, and Rodolpho, the artistic and glamorous type, probably, but not definitely, brothers. They find a hideout in the apartment of Marco’s cousin, Beatrice, and her husband, Eddie, Americans sure but Italians just a generation in the past. Eddie’s niece, Catherine, also lives there, about to turn 18 and, well, it’s not hard to imagine what happens when she catches sight of Rodolpho’s blond hair and flashing eyes.

Nancy Crane is on stage throughout as the chorus/lawyer, Alfieri, offering up slightly superfluous commentary to us across the fourth wall and some legal advice mixed in with psychological therapy to Eddie - she is the bridge of the title, having grown up in Italy, but thrived in New York. Maybe it worked better in 1956 but, like director, Holly Race Roughan’s, decision to interpolate a ballet dancing longshoreman into the scene transitions, the narrator dilutes rather than cranks up the tension. And the tension tightens and tightens round Eddie, his fate inexorably rushing towards him as the tragic protagonist. 

You see it first in his touchy-feely relationship with Catherine. Rachelle Diedericks’ teenager may be all adolescent ribbons at first impression, but she’s bright and assertive, rapidly leaving the girl behind and embracing the woman of her future. Jonathan Slinger gives Eddie a tad of guilt in his self-indulgent pleasure in observing this transition (and the fact that he’s not sleeping with his loving and patient wife, Beatrice, underlines that there’s more than just a surrogate father’s love for a surrogate daughter in play here). It’s a creepily incestuous desire and plies up our sympathy (perhaps now more than ever) behind those who line up against Eddie.  

Soon Eddie’s old world of certainties begins to unravel and he feels like a man on an out-of-control helter-skelter. Slinger shows the pain that his loss of entitlement and the seductive assumed victimhood that runs alongside it, brings to a once fundamentally good man, who provided for Beatrice and Catherine and lately Marco and Rodolpho too. But Eddie cannot understand why they aren’t more grateful to him, aren’t more amenable to his wishes, aren’t more accommodating of what he wants, sexually, socially and psychologically - he fails to grasp that his writ no longer runs to his family, to his heritage. 

This journey to madness resonated with the appeal of populism, with analyses of the Trump base who cannot accept a world of equal opportunities and shifting pronouns, with the horrors of change pumped into fearful minds on television in the USA, in newspapers in the UK and worldwide on social media. There are lots of Eddies now, a genuinely scary throught.

Slinger walks a tightrope successfully: tread too far into caricature and we stop caring about him; give him even a hint of cool NYC sophistication and the Sicilian disappears. Kirsty Bushell also delivers as Beatrice, his wife no doormat, but trapped in a woman’s submissive role in either culture in which the action moves. 

Tommy Sim’aan hasn’t much to do as Marco - his character traits and arc are pretty clear from the moment we meet him, but Luke Newberry brings a subtle ambiguity to his brother. Eddie suspects Rodolpho is gay and is using Catherine’s infatuation as means to secure a marriage certificate and a US passport. And Newberry keeps this possibility alive - Eddie may be right. 

Perhaps more intriguingly from the perspective afforded in 2023, Rodolpho’s sexuality may slip and slide: he might desire the love of Catherine, but he might also desire the attention of the dock workers who laugh at his ways (singing, joking, even dressmaking). It’s a high testosterone world - Marco, three kids back home, fits in perfectly - but Rodolpho is ploughing his own furrow and not failing.

Until Eddie, exasperated by the fact that the law, his wife, his niece and his lodgers will not bend to his will, presses the nuclear button and goes all-in with the USA and all-out with the Sicilians - and we know from The Godfather and its vast legacy, that Eddie has made the wrong call. The small town of Red Hook, in which the action takes place, soon earns its name all right.

One might have expected this production to be mounted on the smaller Minerva stage (as was The Beauty Queen of Leenane, with which it shares some themes, in 2021) but placing it in the vast auditorium forces us to view the play differently. 

The suggestion of a soap operaish working class family drama, sink in the background, broken radiator on the wall, never arises. The yawning spaces on the stage force us to find the requisite claustrophobia in the minds of the characters - they are trapped by the immigrant’s dilemma of pulls to assimilate on the one hand, if only to get by, but also pulls to retain one’s personal identity in a world that can be hostile and strange. None of these characters are thrown together, pressed up against each other. We hear in Miller’s beautiful dialogue that the brothers are sleeping on the floor, but we see what they see - the huge spaces of potential their new lives afford. It is in the rural idyll of lemon groves back in Europe that they really feel imprisoned by poverty. One feels the influence of Anton Chekhov, whose writing shrank the vastness of Russia into a drawing room. 

Back to the first point in this review, not knowing a classic work of 20th century drama allowed me to come to the play with a jigsaw set of reference points, but no photograph on the box with which to compare my emerging image of the entitled patriarch, the maturing woman, the manipulative immigrant, the clashing of cultures, the law in books and the law in action. As with all great art, the picture we make is not the artists’, but our own, one likely to change with time and our own circumstances.  

I’ll continue to see Eddies everywhere in 2023 and beyond, but the one I’m really looking out for is the one in the mirror. That’s a man who needs to be quashed before he finds his voice, because, if not quite literally, I suspect I’d face the same fate if my internal Eddie starts to talk more than he does now.            

A View From The Bridge is at Chichester Festival Theatre until 28 October and at the Rose Theatre Kingston from 31 October to 11 November   

Photo: The Other Richard

 

  

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