Theatre reviews: A View From the Bridge | Heaven

Jemima Levick’s beautifully-paced production of A View From the Bridge benefits from a superb performance by Mark Holgate as conflicted hero Eddie Carbone, writes Joyce McMillan

A View From The Bridge, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★

Heaven, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

It hardly needs the shipping-container space of Alex Lowde’s set, or the casual 21st century clothes worn by the characters in this new Tron production, to point up the intense connection between Arthur Miller’s mighty 1955 tragedy A View From The Bridge, and the fraught politics of our time.

Immigration, and the movement of peoples between nations and continents, has always been a subject that unleashes primal passions, from the ancient imperative of hospitality to strangers and travellers, to the profound sexual paranoia that so often - in right wing political discourse - frames “immigrants” as rapists and sexual predators. And all of these passions, and more, are present in Miller’s superb Brooklyn waterfront drama, brilliantly chosen by new Tron artistic director Jemima Levick as her debut production at the theatre.

The play opens as our hero Eddie Carbone - a hard-working docker of 50 or-so - welcomes to his home his wife Beatrice’s cousins Marco and Rodolpho, illegal immigrants fleeing from the grinding poverty of postwar Italy.

At first, all is hospitality and solidarity; but when the younger brother Rodolpho - blonde, outgoing, a talented singer - starts to romance 18-year-old Catherine, the niece whom Eddie and Beatrice have brought up as their own, an already simmering crisis in Eddie’s intense and over-protective relationship with Catherine explodes to the surface, in a torrent of hatred, paranoia, bigotry, accusation and projection that seems both unbearably painful, and all too familiar.

A View From the Bridge | Contributed

In Levick’s beautifully-paced production - with a tremendous, brooding score by Claire McKenzie - Mark Holgate makes a superb Eddie, frightening and poignant by turns, driven to a shocking act of betrayal, and of social and moral self-destruction, by a passion he can never acknowledge. Nicole Cooper is superb as Beatrice, wrestling to survive a crisis in her marriage - and in Catherine’s journey to adulthood - which she understands only too well.

Holly Howden Gilchrist’s Catherine is a poignant and all too credible young teenager on a fast track to a hard, grief-scarred womanhood. And all three are brilliantly supported by quietly flawless performances from Michael Guest as Rodolpho, Reuben Joseph as Marco, and an eloquent Nicholas Karimi as the lawyer Alfieri, meditating like some timeless sage on the mighty journey these characters have made from one world to another, and on a story of goodness and decency destroyed by a painful lack of self-knowledge, and by a cult of machismo that almost demands such denial, in the face of a complex world.

Janet Moran in Heaven | Steven Murray

Passion is also the theme of Eugene O’Brien’s superb double monologue Heaven, making a welcome return to the Traverse Theatre after winning a Scotsman Fringe First Award there in 2023. Produced by Irish new play company Fishamble, and flawlessly directed by Jim Culleton, O’Brien’s 85-minute play tells the entwined stories of middle-class Limerick couple Mairead and Mal, now aged around 50.

At a weekend wedding in Mairead’s up-country hometown, it soon becomes clear that both are in the grip of an intense search for meaning, in middle life; and much of the joy of the play comes from the beautifully observed and brilliantly written contrast between Mairead’s intensely self-aware and more or less flagrant pursuit of a moment of heterosexual bliss with an old lover she encounters at the wedding, and Mal’s growing recognition of his life-long love and desire for other men, so far never confessed to another living soul.

Janet Moran’s performance as Mairead glows with energy and precision; Andrew Bennet’s as Mal matches her all the way in his quietly humorous self-deprecation, and desperate lurch towards the truth. And if the play leaves their futures hanging in the balance, so much the better; in a 21st century tale that still remains partly unwritten, about what really happens when human beings begin to live in the truth about their sexual selves.

A View From The Bridge is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until 15 March. Heaven is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until 1 March.