One of 2014’s most celebrated productions, Ivo van Hove’s stark take on Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, is to get an even wider audience as it transfers to the West End in February 2015.
The Young Vic production, starring Mark Strong and Nicola Walker, was described as “forceful” and “radical” by Michael Billington, while the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer gave it five stars, calling it “one of the most powerful productions of a Miller play I have ever seen”.
On announcing the transfer to Wyndham’s, the Young Vic’s artistic director David Lan called it “truly the production of a lifetime. I am thrilled so many more people will share this exceptional experience.” It’s another success for Lan’s theatre, whose production of The Scottsboro Boys, an edgy musical about racial bigotry, also successfully transferred this year.
As with his earlier minimalist take on Angels in America, Van Hove stripped out any Brooklyn anachronisms from his A View from the Bridge set, with just a bare thrust stage lined with a dark mirrored wall – leaving all the more space for Miller’s drama of jealousy, race and oneupmanship.
In a Guardian interview, Van Hove described the play as “like witnessing a car accident that you see a hundred metres before it happens – you just know they’re going to smash ... One moment you sympathise with the person you hate, then in the next scene you hate somebody you love. It keeps going until the end.”
Booking opens on 17 November for the run, which goes from 11 February to 11 April 2015.
More Stage coverage
• Mark Strong interview: ‘It’s stark and bare and brutal’
• Monroe and Miller’s sensational year – in pictures
• ‘My aim is the ultimate production’: Van Hove on Miller
• The Fountainhead review – Ivo van Hove’s smouldering take on Ayn Rand
