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But still the same
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
I bought this for my drama and English studies and I really don't think the stories that great but the book was in an almost new condition and had no markings on it. Brilliant for making edits
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
The signs weren’t exactly propitious for this show. In an interview prior to the production, the Belgian director Ivo van Hove declared: “Listen, I am not so much a fan of Arthur Miller. He’s a great playwright but often his plays are ethical, you know? Good against evil. I’m not so interested in good and evil.” If he is not interested in good and evil you might wonder why he chose to direct a play by the American writer who famously described himself as “an impatient moralist”. But in fact this staging of A View from the Bridge (1956) is one of the most powerful productions of a Miller play I have ever seen. It breaks the surly bonds of naturalism and the conventions of the well-made play to create a work of seething intensity and savage beauty that grips the audience throughout its interval-free two-hour playing time. By the end you feel both emotionally drained and unexpectedly elated – the classic hallmarks of a great tragic production. The action is presented on an almost bare stage that resembles a hip, minimalist art gallery rather than the scruffy home of a Brooklyn dock-worker, and there are long pregnant silences that make Pinter seem like a chatterbox. In many of the scenes Fauré’s Requiem is played and there is also a sudden blast of BB King’s great guitar solo in The Thrill Is Gone. The story revolves around the central character Eddie Carbone’s unhealthy, possessive love for his 17-year-old niece, who has lived with Eddie and his wife since the death of her mother years earlier. When the family take in two illegal immigrants from Italy, Eddie seethes with anger and resentment as the young, innocent Catherine falls in love with the younger of the two brothers. The tension builds inexorably, and flares into violent confrontation and betrayal. Like the lawyer who narrates the story, we watch the action appalled, knowing that something dreadful is going to happen. It is just a question of when, and how. The acting is superb. Eddie Carbone is one of the greatest roles in modern drama, a truly tragic hero with the fatal flaw of his unhealthy love for his niece, and Mark Strong captures his terrible disintegration with raw pain, inarticulate passion, and emotional and physical violence. His eyes, in Miller’s phrase, really are like tunnels, a thousand mile stare of loss, dread and sexual confusion. Nicola Walker movingly captures the agony of his wife, watching the man she loves slowly destroy himself and his family, while Phoebe Fox reveals both the blossoming sexuality of a teenage girl and her baffled confusion over Eddie’s violent mood-swings. There is outstanding work too from Emun Elliott and Luke Norris as the immigrants desperate to escape terrible poverty in Italy, and from Michael Gould as the increasingly anguished lawyer-narrator, who serves the function of the Chorus in a Greek tragedy – a form of theatre that Miller manifestly had in mind when he wrote A View from the Bridge. I left The Young Vic in no doubt that I had seen a great, fresh-minted production of a modern classic.Read full review
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