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A View From The Bridge

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The Duke Of York's
St Martin's Lane, WC2N 4BG

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Dir: Lindsay Posner.
Cast: Ken Stott, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

Description: Ken Stott and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio star in Arthur Miller's drama, focusing on themes of jealousy and a loss of control. Directed by Lindsay Posner.

Trains: Tube: Leicester Square/Charing Cross

Phone: 0870060 6623
Website: www.theambassadors.com/dukeofyorks

 

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Forbidden lust in A View From the Bridge

 

Family ties: Ken Stott as the uncle obsessed with his niece, played by Hayley Atwell

Cheers: first night party at Ruby Blue with their co-stars Harry Lloyd and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

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You need go no further than Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex or John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore to be reminded of what spine-chilling, tragic drama can be provoked when incestuous desire shatters the bonds of even the best regulated families.

The impact of Lindsay Posner’s menacing production of Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge, in which Ken Stott’s mesmerising Eddie Carbone induces shudders of revulsion, ought to serve notice that the incest taboo has lost little of its potency.

Yet Miller deals with what might be called second-hand incest, since Stott’s Italian-American longshoreman nurses an obvious but unacknowledged passion for his wife’s niece, Catherine.

This is Miller writing in the mid-Fifties and at well below his best. Alluding early on to the shortness of Catherine’s fairly long skirt, he crudely allows Eddie to signal his sexualised concern for Catherine and fear of men who fancy her.

Carbone’s obsession then grows, flourishes and intensifies. It becomes a household embarrassment, particularly after the family take in two Italian brothers, both illegal immigrants.

When the younger one, Harry Lloyd’s charming, intense, blond Rodolpho falls for Hayley Atwell’s vivacious Catherine and she for him, Eddie begins to snarl, seethe and shuffle his way to accidental self-destruction.

I object only to Miller’s decision to make the hetero Rodolpho victim of Eddie’s homophobic taunts. This contributed in the American witch-hunting Fifties to the notion that being gay was the lowest form of male life.

Christopher Oram’s imaginative design captures the play’s claustrophobic, nightmare quality by allowing us to see both the peeling exterior of the family home and its shabby interior.

In this cramped environment, Stott puts on a mesmerising display. Like a seething bull at bay, he radiates an all-round aggression. It shows in his accusing stare, the rasp of his voice and in the kiss he plants first on his niece’s lips and then on Rodolpho’s, in mockery of the boy’s maleness.

Unable to sever the ties that quickly draw the would-be lovers to dance in the living room and gaze in each other’s eyes, Eddie resorts to becoming an informer — the very thing Miller avoided in real life when hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He anonymously tells the Immigration Department of the Italians’ presence. It may all sound tragic, and Allan Corduner’s chorus-like lawyer vainly tries to make it so, but it is no such elevated thing.

The fascination of A View From The Bridge lies in its terrific psycho-dramatics and psycho-dynamics, its cult of the theatre of embarrassment.

Here, in front of his frightened wife and niece, both of whom know what is happening but dare not allude to it, Eddie is driven wild by the itch of a desire that cannot be acknowledged.

The impassioned distress of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s wife and Atwell’s agonised embarrassment runs counter to Stott’s fury and gives the evening its shocking, emotional dynamic: family life rent asunder.

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