In 2014 Ivo van Hove’s Young Vic staging of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge drew comparisons to monumental Greek drama. Lightning has struck twice with this magnificent, shuddering production of Miller’s 1946 play – it perfects the art of doing less for more effect and is performed at the same West End venue where its predecessor transferred.
Van Hove, known for giving the classics his own stamp, steps back here, it seems, letting the cast (and what a cast this is) not just inhabit their parts but somehow become them as if by magic. They articulate the devastating truths in this play about the corruptions of the American dream and the toxic inheritance handed down from fathers to sons. How relevant these truths seem today: it is as if Miller were speaking directly about now. A line can be drawn from the play’s themes of selling faulty equipment to government and the unaccountability of corrupt capitalist patriarchs to Trumpian facts and delusions, Grenfell and the Covid-era PPE scandal.
Yet the story is followed with fidelity to the original: wealthy industrialist Joe Keller (Bryan Cranston) served time in jail for knowingly supplying defective aircraft cylinder heads to the army during the second world war, leading to the deaths of 21 US pilots, but has since cleared his name by blaming his business partner, Steve Deever. War has claimed its victims in this family nonetheless. His wife, Kate (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), is waiting for their son, Larry, to return, several years on. Their other son, Chris (Paapa Essiedu), is getting ready to propose to Larry’s fiancee, Ann (Hayley Squires), the daughter of Joe’s jailed partner.
Ingenious tweaks render it a radically different experience. Miller’s three acts come with an interval but this runs straight through at a pace that is reminiscent of ancient Greek theatre in its fateful tragedy. There is a Sophoclean examination of the family, what it means for a son to inherit a father’s crimes, and the production lays out the psychology of blame, guilt and complicity in an incredibly full-bodied and clarifying way.
Everyone colludes with the lie that Joe is innocent, to some degree, and every character here seems to know the truth, deep down, guiltily blind right from the start, which compounds their grief at the end. Ann is ready to put aside Joe’s culpability in order to secure her marriage to Chris while Kate, as the play’s most vulnerable character, cannot admit Larry is dead because then she must contend with her husband’s crimes (which are entwined in his dying). Joe, for his part, shows us how lies this damaging must necessarily contain self-delusion and deflection, or else it is too awful to live with them.
The old felled tree of the opening scene lies across the stage, looking vaguely Godot-like. A plain house front is the backdrop, with a circular portal that might be a window but also transforms into something more elemental – variously the sun and the moon.
The symbolist sparseness of Jan Versweyveld’s set design drives the production further into the realm of the epic and timeless. Then there is the cast; it is a rare thing to see a group of actors quite this brilliant gel so completely. Essiedu is magnetic from the moment he steps on to the stage, his fractious face-offs with his father full of jeopardy. So are Jean-Baptiste and Cranston, along with Squires’ quietly desperate Ann. Tom Glynn-Carney brings intensity as Ann’s angry brother, who is also seduced into collusion with Keller’s lies. Every scene is strong, no actor stealing the show, each raising the power of the ensemble as a whole. There is so much alchemy here – it just dazzles and dazzles.
