Review | A View From The Bridge at Chichester Festival Theatre: "Bleak but beautiful"

This is a joint production with Headlong, Octagon Theatre and Rose Theatre – and with that sort of pedigree, this show should shine.

Well – overall it does and, at the very least, it glows gently – but there are some unusual artistic choices made here, some of which left me cold.

But more of that later. Let’s start with the good stuff.

Miller’s play, set in New York among the port-workers, concerns illegal immigrants trying to start a new life in the United States. One of the immigrants falls for the niece of Eddie, the man whose house they have taken refuge in… or has he? Is this, as Eddie suspects, a ruse to obtain his US citizenship?

This is a beautifully cast show with particularly good work from Jonathan Slinger as the repulsive Eddie – a character who has no redeeming feature to me – Tommy Sim’aan as Marco and Rachelle Diedricks as Catherine, the niece. Luke Newberry as Rodolfo, the Italian immigrant who claims to love Catherine, didn’t quite convince.

That cannot be said about Kirsty Bushell as Eddie’s wife, Beatrice. This performance soars in every respect. Bushell owns this role. She rampages across that stage – huge and loud and explosive but miniscule and detailed and restrained and when the drama reaches its inevitably tragic end her wail of agony swamps the audience in Beatrice’s pain. Absolutely astonishing work.

The sound is wonderful and the almost infrasound rumble that pervades a lot of the performance is deeply unsettling.

I have to say, though, that I just did not understand the use of a (very able) ballet dancer (Elijah Holloway) who acts almost as an alter-Eddie; a comment on Eddie’s aggression. It must be said that his appearance began to raise laughs by the second act. If this was a directorial-comment on the text, it didn’t really work for me.

It’s bleak; it’s beautiful; it’s worth the trip to Chichester.

Until Saturday, October 28.