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Miller’s bridge over troubled family waters
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
Duke Of Yorks Theatre
BLOOD is thicker than water. For Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone, blood is thick as diesel oil: unctuous, dark, clinging.
No man is good enough for his niece Catherine, “a Madonna type” he has raised from childhood to womanhood after the death of his sister.
But Catherine is no longer a little girl; she “walks wavy” now, and she craves independence.
When the charismatic Italian immigrant Rodolfo arrives under the family roof, blonde quiff quivering in the direction of Catherine, the squat and pugnacious Eddie feels his power slipping.
Arthur Miller’s brooding take on family values has retained all its power to affect and unsettle since it premiered on the London stage in 1956, when the play was performed in “club” conditions to sidestep the controversy of Eddie’s homo-psychotic kiss with Rodolfo.
Yet it is not the latent homosexuality or the incestuous implications that stick in the craw.
It is the erosion of a proud patriarch; a man with an outmoded sense of honour who believes his family owe him an eternal debt, who cannot let go, not just of his niece, but of any part of his kingdom.
The tragedy and bloodshed of the final scene is a fait accompli from Eddie’s first truculent outburst in
Act One.
Ken Stott as Eddie cuts a small but powerful figure against Christopher Oram’s hulking street corner set, though it is the supporting cast who impress most.
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Allan Corduner are excellent as Eddie’s harried, overlooked wife and the neighbourhood’s choric lawyer Alfieri respectively.
Critical reception has been strangely lukewarm for this show.
True, it is easy to conflate Miller’s brilliant, tensile writing with dramatic tautness, but Lindsay Posner’s production does stand on its own two feet.
Most of the time we settle for half, the arbiter Alfieri observes, but Miller’s masterpiece offers no middle ground, no third path, and no easy way out.
Booking to May 19
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