Beyond praise: Luke Norris, Emun Elliott, Phoebe Fox and Mark Strong in A View from the Bridge.
Phrases from the Faure Requiem, notably the Kyrie Eleison (a haunting call on God's mercy), provide the doom-laden soundtrack to this bold and brilliant production of Arthur Miller's titanic 1955 tragedy of sexual obsession.
Looped and repeated, they have the force of a bell tolling, as does the beat of a single conga drum, ratcheting up the menace by the minute. It's a masterly touch in a show chock-a-block with them.
For my money, Bridge is the best play by the English language's second-best playwright. That it never gained the iconic status of the classroom classic Death of a Salesman is doubtless to do with its much darker subject matter, but in it, Miller traffics in elemental ideas, and his writing, which blends the choppy, syncopated immigrant vernacular with the sublimely poetic and evocative, is the work of a man at his creative peak. (Was there a better last line in any play, ever?)
Italian-American watersider Eddie Carbone (Strong) and his wife Beatrice (Walker) are raising their orphan niece Catherine (Fox) in their modest Brooklyn apartment. When they take in a pair of illegals from the old country, Marco (Elliott) and Rodolfo (Norris), and Catherine takes a shine to one of the new arrivals, it lights a slow-burning fuse of possessive rage in Eddie, which everybody but he can see burning.
