David Thacker became Arthur Miller’s go-to director for the British premieres of his later works, and his revivals are always invested with the authority of their close working relationship. Perhaps it isn’t altogether surprising to find that Thacker’s View from the Bridge could not be more opposed to Ivo van Hove’s controversial, paradigm-shifting one at the Young Vic.
If Van Hove’s minimalist, abstract approach deliberately stripped the play of its social context, Thacker remains convinced that context is everything. Ciaran Bagnall’s design incorporates the Octagon’s gantries to form a lowering impression of the Brooklyn bridge; and as if to dispel any further doubt, there’s a monochrome view of the Manhattan skyline in the distance.
Thacker makes the key point that when longshoreman Eddie Carbone turns in his own cousins to the immigration authorities, he betrays not only his family but also an inviolable code of honour that binds the entire community. The production employs a non-speaking chorus to portray the hardscrabble Red Hook neighbourhood, whose silent condemnation of Colin Connor’s increasingly desperate Eddie is quite chillingly realised.
It’s worth noting that Miller does not specify the presence of additional witnesses any more than Van Hove’s fountains of blood. What it does prove is that the play is a sufficiently multi-angled masterpiece to make both interpretations equally valid. Barbara Drennan’s portrayal of Eddie’s neglected wife is heartbreakingly counterpointed with his over-familiar fondness for his niece, played with dangerously transparent candour by Natasha Davidson. David Nabil Stuart’s Marco smoulders with a primitive, Sicilian sense of honour and Tristan Brooke is splendidly provocative as the fey Rodolpho, whose destiny beyond this tragedy seems surely to be to establish an ice-cream parlour somewhere on the Lower East Side.
• Until 14 February. Box office: 01204 520 661. Venue: Octagon, Bolton.
