★★★★☆
Four Stars
In the introductory video to National Theatre Live’s screening of A View from the Bridge, the artistic director of the Young Vic, David Lan, makes a cogent point. We already think we know how this play should be performed, and he’s right. Arthur Miller’s 1956 story about a Brooklyn docker family on the verge of tragedy is one with which many theatre goers (and English Literature GCSE students) will already be familiar.
But it soon becomes clear that Belgian director Ivo Van Hove’s take on A View from the Bridge is no conventional production. Van Hove condenses the play to its essence, defamiliarises it, and presents it to us in a way which is both refreshing and arresting. The resulting production has proven so popular that it is now enjoying a run in the West End, and is being broadcast in cinemas across the country as part of the National Theatre Live programming.
National Theatre Live is having a bit of a moment. The initiative, which records performances in London and then screens them across the world, now forms a staple part of many independent and chain cinemas’ output. It launched in summer 2009, and is now well into its stride with over 3.5 million viewers in more than 1,100 venues.
But with the ticket prices usually higher than normal film screenings (an eye-watering £17.50 for an adult at the Phoenix Picturehouse), do they really offer enough for the money? For £17.50, I admit I’d be reluctant. NTLive is hardly a feasible audience outreach strategy at such a prohibitive cost. But for the more tolerable sum of £8.00 (which I paid at the Odeon in Manchester), A View from the Bridge offered an evening of fantastic theatre at great value.
Van Hove’s avant-garde influence on the production is felt immediately. The set is minimalist in the extreme – blank walls, no furnishings, largely drab costumes. The stripped-back surroundings put pressure on the actors to nail Miller’s complex web of character motivations. A challenge to which the cast rise admirably.
Mark Strong is utterly magnetic as Eddie Carbone; the longshoreman with a consuming love for his niece, Catherine. When two relatives from Italy begin to encroach on his territory and threaten his honour, Eddie’s paranoia drives him to destruction. Strong strikes the delicate balance between emasculated vulnerability and dominant aggression, as Eddie is slowly stifled by his jealousy.
Emun Elliott brings a quiet, menacing gravitas to industrious immigrant Marco. The moment when he holds a chair aloft in an assertion of strength is dramatised to biblical proportions by Van Hove’s choice of near-celestial lighting and choral crescendo. This quasi-religious tone is echoed by the striking physical composition of the scenes. At times, the way the characters position themselves to emphasise the power dynamics at play feels as carefully calculated as an Italian Renaissance painting.
Breezy ingénue Catherine is portrayed competently by Phoebe Fox, and the scenes with her sidelined aunt Beatrice, played by the excellent Nicola Walker, betray her slightly sinister acuity in a way which never feels heavy-handed. Similarly, the niggling sexual undertone to Eddie and Catherine’s relationship is accentuated from the start, though Strong and Fox keep it at a controlled simmer rather than over-emphasising its sordid quality. Still, Fox is most convincing in her comic interludes with flamboyant upstart Rodolpho (Luke Norris) – even if her Italian-American accent is less than perfect. Rodolpho himself is sweet and eager without being saccharine. His exclamation of “My little girl!” to Catherine in their moment of passion is downplayed, but still wonderfully jarring.
The whole cast deserve to be lauded for the superb, seething tension they maintain throughout. Van Hove’s decision to do away with an interval pays off. By the time the play nears its emotional climax, the intensity has reached electrifying, almost unbearable levels. Van Hove’s avant-garde leanings also find expression in his decision to have the stage directions vocalised by lawyer/narrator Alfieri in the heat of conflict. Far from being irritating, this bold move was reminiscent of a court record being relayed, and gave a delicious sense of fatalism to the rapidly evolving action.
So can the intensity of the theatre experience be effectively transmitted across a cinema screen? For the most part, yes. I was certainly gripped by the unfolding action, and the filming is unobtrusive enough to make the experience feel immersive. It is remarkably easy to forget you’re in a cinema auditorium and I doubt I was the only person fighting the compulsion to applaud at the end. That said, the surprising (and slightly gimmicky) nature of the final scene elicited a couple of sniggers from the cinema audience – a reaction it is hard to imagine would have happened in a theatre environment.
A cinema screening is never going to match the raw presence of a performance seen in-the-flesh. But if the aim is to deliver a feel of the play, and, as Ivo Van Hove professed in his video interview, to “reach an audience as big as possible” in the process, then NTLive hasn’t done a bad job at all. A standardised, lower ticket cost would strengthen the initiative, but this production of A View from the Bridge certainly deserves to be seen.
