She’s an overgrown daddy’s girl, basically, jumping into his arms and wrapping her legs round his waist. Their tactile relationship is perfectly pitched: once innocuous, now inappropriate. At home, initially, he softens to mere clay with his wife Beatrice (Nicola Walker) and his teenage niece Catherine, played girlish and gawky by Phoebe Fox.
ENDVIEW BRIDGE SKIN
Strong’s Eddie is a man-shaped muscle, held together by skin and so clenched that he seems like stone. Van Hove makes the best possible case for it on a minimalist set by Jan Versweyveld that is at once an amphitheater, a church and a giant microscope. Miller was aiming for a modern-day Greek tragedy. Its cocktail of characters prove a uniquely volatile mix and the particular setting makes the perfect catalyst. In fact, the text comes to seem close to flawless. You get this play - how it works, what it’s saying - and, in a single sitting, that’s incredible. Every design element works to fine-tune our focus - slow-shifting lights keep your eyes peeled, occasional drumbeats prick up your ears - and the Belgian director teases out so many of the play’s textures and tensions that, watching, you start to feel like a first-class literature major. If it’s an entrancing, electrifying watch, van Hove also manages to turn us into expert watchers.
This is theater as an out of body experience. For two hours straight, it plays on a knife-edge as we wait, wound-tight, for the inevitable detonation of Mark Strong’s Eddie Carbone. Played barefoot on a bare white stage, freed from its real-world setting, it’s like the play has been triple-distilled and served neat: 100 percent proof. Ivo van Hove’s stripped-back staging, now in the West End after a sell-out Young Vic run last year, is definitive enough to ward a generation off Arthur Miller’s family drama. It will be a long time before London sees “A View From the Bridge” again.
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