A View from the Bridge: Dominic West is a revelation in this good old-fashioned production
Fancy that: no video-cameras, no ostentatious mics – and a proper set! While I rated Sarah Snook in the technologically tricksy Dorian Gray at the Theatre Royal Haymarket earlier this year, I think that if Lindsey Posner’s revival of Arthur Miller’s mid-1950s masterpiece, first seen in Bath and starring Dominic West as Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone, had headed down a similar route, I’d have run from the theatre screaming.
It was, in fact, Belgian guru Ivo van Hove’s acclaimed assault on expectations where A View from the Bridge is concerned, 10 years ago, stripping things right back, that bolstered the directorial vogue for knocking the stuffing out of cosily familiar classics. Posner, who ably directed Ken Stott in the play (again in the West End) back in 2009, understands that taking a more old-fashioned approach and duly indicating the milieu in which Carbone moves isn’t a matter of being decorative. Peter McKintosh’s set, with its towering walls of horizontal slatted wood, creates a sense of claustrophobic, watchful communality; there’s no demarcation (lighting aside) between the hero’s tenement flat and his neighbourhood.
When the blond, funny and crooning Rodolpho arrives from Sicily, seeking illicit work opportunities (with his brother Marco), it’s as if a flower has bloomed in the desert. The young head of Carbone’s niece Catherine, raised as though his own daughter, is turned, and all hell breaks loose psychologically. In insisting on his claim to shape the girl’s future, refusing to acknowledge the limits of his protective care, and defying the codes of his people, Carbone becomes a doomed outcast.
West, whose default bankability was further enhanced through playing Prince Charles in The Crown, excels himself at this end of the social spectrum – an advertisement, if one were needed, for the versatility of the ex-Etonian. He has the bear-like heft to convince as a breadwinner who has long taken gruelling dockside work in his stride but is feeling the strain of midlife; there’s something angsty about the way he visibly chews his lips.
Initially complacent, expecting an adoration that Nia Towle’s Catherine freely gives, he’s the king of his domain, but like Lear, when slighted of filial obedience, he moves towards testiness, legible confusion and roaring derangement, with Kate Fleetwood vividly resentful as his wife Beatrice, plaintive on the sidelines.
West neither woos nor sabotages our sympathies, allowing us to understand his simple, if blinkered mindset – never reductively incestuous but ducking, at a fundamental level, a truth about a dependency on Catherine that has entered very murky territory. When he bitterly screws up a newspaper while she dances with Rodolpho (Callum Scott Howells, superb in his sweet charisma and growing defiance), the tension that gesture denotes underlines the evening’s judicious mixture of comic notes and tragic registers.
Not every moment is as perfect – you always tend to see the joins in the rueful, perspective-framing commentary by the lawyer Alfieri (Martin Marquez). But this is a robust, gripping account of a Miller masterpiece – and the perhaps underrated West, 54, can take his place alongside the great past interpreters of the role.
Until Aug 3; trh.co.uk
