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A View From The Bridge theatre review: Tale of betrayal and honour

A 20th-century slice of American’s drama canon still manages to resonate with the struggles and traumas of now

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A View From The Bridge theatre review: Tale of betrayal and honour

Mark Holgate’s Eddie Carbone simmers with silverback energy in the Tron’s new version of Arthur Miller’s 1955 classic about betrayal, honour and transgressive sexuality in a working-class immigrant community. The New York dock worker is raising an orphaned niece Catherine (wide-eyed Holly Howden Gilchrist) with his wife Beatrice (battle-hardened Nicole Cooper). But as Catherine grows into a young woman, Eddie’s avuncular feelings towards her curdle into something more disquieting.

Meanwhile, two houseguests arrive illegally from impoverished post-war Italy, with one of them, Rodolpho (peppy Michael Guest), starting a romance with Eddie’s young charge. Events spiral towards their inevitable conclusion with all the force of a Greek tragedy. What’s striking about revisiting this play in 2025 is how, as with so much of Miller’s canon, many of the anxieties it surfaces seem to be our own. ‘They’ve been pulling this since the immigration law was put in. They grab a green kid that don’t know nothing,’ says an enraged Eddie to a disbelieving Catherine, as he tries to explain why her new beau is, in his blunt words, ‘not right.’

Pictures: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan 

Director Jemima Levick leans into these contemporary associations. Rodolpho and his cousin Marco (Reuben Joseph’s strong, silent type) arrive in the noughties jumble-sale attire (shell-suits, hiking rucksacks) of modern asylum seekers. In truth, the updates are jarring in some respects, because Miller’s speech rhythms land us so squarely in mid 20th-century Italian Brooklyn. But we get the point. And a sextet of brilliant performances (completed by Nicholas Karimi’s world-weary narrator) propels us to a white-knuckle climax.

A View From The Bridge, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until Saturday 15 March.

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