"A View From The Bridge". Oxford Playhouse
In her concise, passionate and perceptive programme note, director Rosie Morgan-Males talks about the rhythmic power of Arthur Miller's language, how it manages to deliver unbearable emotion beneath the cadences of everyday speech. She's right. Miller gives poetry to those who cannot express their feelings, and a voice to the inarticulate, without ever departing from the rhythms, words and slang of 1950s Brooklyn harbourmen. A View From The Bridge started life as a one-act play entirely in verse. Labyrinth's production at the Oxford Playhouse may be the two-act prose version, but the performances, the staging and the music are at times so lyrical that this feels like pure theatrical poetry. It's intense, tragic and deeply unsettling. The story focuses on veteran harbour-worker Eddie Carbone, a man around whom the post-War world is changing fast, and who fears what those changes will bring. His niece Catherine is 17 and ready to fly the nest. The illegal immigrant to wh...