A View from the Bridge

“You don't see nothin' and you don't know nothin',” declares Eddie Carbone to his family at the beginning of Arthur Miller's doom-laden drama set in 1950s Brooklyn, hours before the arrival of two not-quite-invisible guests.

The pair are Italian cousins of his wife Beatrice, and illegal immigrants who will be staying indefinitely.

But what the audience knows is not limited to what's seen in the modest home of the longshoreman, his wife and their orphaned niece. The play is narrated by Alfieri, a lawyer recalling the sequence of events, and a happy ending is ruled out before we've even met his clients.

The key question, then, is not what will happen but why, and John Dove's production leaves plenty of room for debate about Eddie's motives and inner turmoil. Perhaps Miller would not have approved of suggesting there could be any genuinely noble reason for a man to put family before community – the play's parallels with his own persecution are as subtle as the left hook that sours relations at the end of the first act – but he was a moralist, not a sociologist, and it certainly makes for a more interesting drama to consider this might be the case.

At a result, Stanley Townsend's convincing portrayal of Eddie's downward spiral is not the unravelling of a two-dimensional bogeyman overtaken by sexual jealousy, and the armchair diagnosis of his problems by Beatrice (Kathryn Howden) is by no means the last word on the matter.

The interplay between the naïve but confident Catherine (Kirsty Mackay) and her extroverted suitor Rodolpho (Gunnar Cauthery) is also pitched just right, with the latter the kind of charmer who might struggle to win the approval of any father.

While A View From The Bridge is not light entertainment, this is an engaging production that goes beyond black-and-white parable.