‘…not purely good, but himself purely, for he allowed himself to be wholly known…’ In the final lines of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the lawyer Alfieri, a chorus to the tragedy, releases the power of the play. We have seen the central character, Eddie Carbone, driven by nothing but his own half-awareness of his desire for his niece, blow apart his wife, his family and his world and destroy himself in the way of it. Alfieri told us this was coming, and shows us how he encompasses the troubling fact of the illicit passion – he nods, humanely, to Eddie’s inability to hide anything of himself.
Ivo van Hove, the director of this production at the Young Vic in London, strips everything bare, stripping down the cast even, to the central characters. The staging is simply a shallow white rectangle surrounded by a continuous bench. There is one door, there is no furniture, there are no props. This is tragedy as ritual, with all the inevitability of its conclusion foreseen from the beginning, set in motion by the stately music of Faure’s Requiem (in itself an extraordinary juxtaposition with the naturalistic American language). The characters are intensely acted by an excellent cast. We know exactly where and when the action is taking place. The language and the story flow through powerful conversation which is minutely paced. A passage of text, written as post-dinner conversation, is played with long pauses, more tense as more time than we think we can bear passes between the lines. The end of the scene, a play-acting of physical violence through a boxing lesson, is the only possible release of Eddie’s entwined anxiety, anger, desire and jealousy.
The long semi-circle of the audience surrounding the bare stage intensifies the pressure of his destiny on Eddie Carbone. Faure’s setting of the ‘dies irae’ lines of the requiem mass – ‘that day, the day of wrath, calamity and misery, that terrible and exceedingly bitter day’ – music of stately inevitability, perfectly supported the rhythm and drive of the text, so that line by line, minute by minute, Eddie Carbone laid himself bare. At his end, he was wholly known to us – and, therefore, we know a little more of ourselves – through a most remarkable piece of classic theatre.
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