Would you report an illegal immigrant working near your home? Such a question is raised in Arthur Miller’s 1950s play A View from the Bridge where a Brooklyn community, many of Italian descent, deliberately turn a blind eye to new arrivals smuggled into the country as “submarines”.
It was also a time when Miller and others were persecuted for their opposition to the naming of names at the ruthless government witch hunt hearings headed by Senator McCarthy. Miller refused to name anyone, but some of his friends such as Elia Kazan reeled off names of people who would then be hounded.
However, such troubling questions never take place in isolation. They mix with and complicate our personal lives. Miller illustrates this sequence by focusing on the family of Eddie Carbone.
The play, directed by Lindsay Posner, takes us back to the 1950s and their tenement home, where the hanging back of stage fire escapes seem to hem them in. One table stands centre stage with hard-backed chairs on each side and, slightly to the left, a single rocking chair.
The minimal set with the aid of changes in the lighting enables swift scene changes from internal events to external street encounters.
Dominic West's fine performance as the longshoreman Eddie Carbone lets us initially see a man weary from work with an easy, good-natured cheerfulness that occasionally gets laughs.
His life isn't easy and he has sometimes had to scramble for work. His very responsive niece Catherine, who says she “can tell a block away when he’s blue in his mind and just wants to talk to somebody quiet and nice”, claims that his wife Beatrice (Kate Fleetwood) goes “at him all the time.”
Such things become more complicated when Beatrice’s cousins, the brothers Marco (Pierro Niel-Mee) and Rodolpho (Callum Scott Howells), arrive as “submarines” from terrible poverty in Italy. Eddie tells them they can stay as long as they need, but warns everyone to be careful what they say about them to avoid their capture and deportation.
Unfortunately, Rudolfo, who can cook, sew and sing jazz, doesn’t fit Eddie’s idea of masculinity, which embarrasses him at work where he suspects his mates feel the same way.
At the same time, Catherine (Nia Towle) is very drawn to Rudolpho, spending evenings out with him and having less time to spend with Eddie.
All this shifts Eddie’s welcoming good humour to awkwardness, then barely concealed hostility and eventually a desperate misery in search of a remedy from lawyer Alfieri (Martin Marquez).
This impressive production, with the aid of a stunning cast, in particular Nia Towle and Dominic West, grounds this classic play in a convincing, naturalistic, historical setting that still resonates in a society where politicians love to hunt migrants.