"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 whom he gives shelter, Rodolpho, presents Eddie with a rush of modernity so alien to his senses that Eddie suspects him both of being gay and wanting to run off with his niece. In his hopeless state of archaic prejudice and wounded innocence, Eddie feels like a representative for blue-collar Americans even today.

The play is a seething mass of repressed desires, withheld confessions and barely-contained fist-fights. And it works so well primarily because Morgan-Males and her cast are simply brilliant at what they do. Nate Wintraub as Eddie is a hulking presence, weighed down by guilt he dare not express even to himself. He's reminiscent of George O'Brien in Friedrich Murnau's 1927 masterpiece Sunrise: Murnau made O'Brien wear weights in the soles of his shoes so that his gait would look heavy and tired, and Wintraub carries those weights in his heart. Back in the 1950s, the shocking scene where Eddie forcefully kisses both his niece and Rodolpho in turn was intended to demonstrate his aggression and control. Now, in the hands of Wintraub and Morgan-Males, it also carries connotations of bisexuality and sexual exploitation. This is no period piece.

Rose Hemon Martin as Eddie's wife Beatrice has an almost uncanny economy of expression, so that every twitch of an elbow, every pause before a word, is loaded with significance. Catherine Claire and Rob Wolfreys as the Juliet and Romeo of this New York story waver with tender and expertly calibrated uncertainty between their desire to escape and their readiness to obey tradition. Gilon Fox as illegal immigrant Marco is both noble and threatening, and Alice Wyles as the Greek-Chorus-cum-local-lawyer Alfieri is both compassionate as advisor and dispassionate as narrator. All together, they form an ensemble that not only realises the devastating dramatic impact of the play, but also gives it the poise, rhythm and mutual balance of a chamber orchestra.

And speaking of orchestras, this production has one. It's both one of its greatest strengths and its Achilles heel. The music is a full score - by which I mean it runs from the very start to the end of the play. The whole piece has (I believe) been composed by Musical Director Louis Benneyworth, and it is absolutely beautiful. Perfectly encapsulating both the time and place of the story, it feels like Bernstein mingled with Glass. If Benneyworth's 'View From The Bridge Suite' were on Spotify, I'd be the first to play it. But it comes perilously close to overwhelming and shattering this Bridge. 

Full disclosure: I've watched this show twice. I first saw it on opening night, when, for all its beauty, the music was so obtrusive that it was actually impossible to follow what was happening in the play. You could just about hear the words, but all the subtlety, the pauses, the intonation - in short the acting - were lost behind an ever-present wall of gorgeous sound. It was like trying to watch Hamlet while an orchestra was playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony right in front of you.

There's a reason soundtracks are normally used in films, not live theatre, and it's because in cinema you can edit the music so it fits perfectly around the dialogue. When people speak, the music fades way into the background. When they stop speaking, back comes the music. On stage, this is next to impossible. And it leads to a cacophony. On that opening Wednesday the music was like Eddie himself: big, bumbling and well-intentioned, but causing chaos and confusion wherever it went.

To the credit of the entire creative team, they recognised this problem after the first night, and by Friday it was like watching a completely different production. In the first half the music played during the interludes between scenes, and in the dialogue-heavy sections it became a sustained, background note, tightening the atmosphere without stealing the attention. It became literally in tune with the play. And it was wondrous.

The second half didn't sustain quite this level of balance, as the music tended to take over again. But to have made such an immense and effective alteration at such short notice is astonishing. One can only imagine the difficulty of the discussions, and the assertiveness and cooperation needed to make such a change. The music is brilliant - but it's not supposed to take over.

Euan Elliott's set design is one of the most effective I've seen at the Playhouse. Constructed out of scaffolding and minimal furniture, it evokes the bridges and jetties of the Hudson docks, while also cradling a protected central zone to function as the Carbone's apartment. And when Eddie makes his fateful (and fatal) phone call to the Immigration Department, the receiver lowers from the heavens like a noose to hang him. Chillingly symbolic.

The lighting too has an appropriately 50s feel to it, with chiaroscuro silhouettes cutting across faces, and a rosy-blue sunset illuminating the background in the latter scenes.

And finally, the beginning: the play opens with a series of snapshots of the old New York docks projected on a gauze at the front of the stage alongside sound effects from the era. It's deliberately both evocative and deceptive: we are superficially going back in time to the immediate post-War days, but this production makes Miller's themes of immigration, fear, gaslighting, and personal ethics set against public law speak directly to the audiences of 2025.