Preview: A View from the Bridge, Kelvin Studios

North Bristol’s excellent non-pro company The Kelvin Players tackle Arthur Miller’s modern classic at their Gloucester Road studio theatre.

A View from the Bridge tells the story of the Italian-American Carbone family, living in 1950s Brooklyn and torn apart after the arrival of illegal immigrant cousins from Sicily.

Here’s director Ralf Togneri to tell us more.

Tell us your reasons for selecting this classic play for Kelvins’ next production.
Miller’s script is brilliantly crafted and makes characters jump off the page to take you into extreme emotional territory you seldom dare visit in daily life – and leaves you better for the experience.
The tale is timeless, with classic themes of love, family, codes of honour and culturally diverse views of justice at odds with the more liberal law of the land.
The current UK immigrants may not be poor Italians, more often refugees fleeing from persecution or poverty from various parts of Europe and the world. The difficult issues, however, arising from cultural clashes remain alive and kicking in contemporary Britain.

You’ve made some interesting staging decisions with this one. Tell us more?
I have set the play with the audience on three sides. This means that some audience members are on the stage and some others are only one tier above that. The players are just a few inches from the audience at times, standing on the same level. This gives a three-dimensional view and the closeness gives the audience a sense of being part of the story.

Desires, jealousies, and the wider Italian/American story: what’s the balance between the personal and the social/political in the play?
A View from the Bridge is very much a personal story – the external environment provides only a setting. Set in 1950s Brooklyn, the play centres on the Italian/American patriarch Eddie Carbone and his reaction to the arrival of two illegal immigrants, Marco and his younger brother, Rodolpho, cousins of his wife Beatrice. The effect that Rodolpho has on Eddie’s niece Catherine is the catalyst for the events which unfold. Eddie is not specifically aware of his closeness to Catherine until Rodolpho arrives – until it looks as though he is losing her.
Eddie and his wife Beatrice are second generation immigrants, living in an immigrant enclave which shares the values of the Sicilian community from which the cousins arrive. There is some tension between the worldviews of the established family and the new arrivals. Eddie feels that Rodolpho is behaving inappropriately – not the way he would behave in Sicily – and he is at pains to point out to Marco and Rodolpho that “it might be a little more free here but it’s just as strict”.

So, how much is A View from the Bridge a play of its time, and how much is it universal?
Social norms develop quickly in large cities but more slowly in sparsely populated areas, so there will always be a clash of moral attitudes between the inhabitants of each location. The play will remain universal so long as there are illegal immigrants, ghetto areas and parents or guardians who have “too much love for a daughter….too much love for the niece” as the lawyer Alfieri points out.
Arthur Miller himself said that, seeing the play performed, it struck him how similar it was to his father’s attitude towards Arthur’s sister and even Arthur’s own attitude to his own daughter. It is a play about human interactions, and human beings do not change that much.

So what is its relevance to contemporary issues, and how if at all are you accentuating that?
There is a great deal in the media about immigrants, legal and illegal. Writing a play that is set in an immigrant community allows the story to be acceptable; setting it in an upper-middle-class, long-established family would have been met with disbelief in the ’50s – ‘that doesn’t happen to nice people like us’. Making the play involve illegal immigrants gives the possibility of repatriation which adds another level of complexity. These are theatrical devices rather than commentary on contemporary issues.
Where Shakespeare populated his stage with kings, Caesars and dukes, Miller uses the common man whose trials and tribulations are no less complex, no less dramatic.  The fallout from these characters’ lives has less impact on a nation but is no less devastating to those immediately surrounding them.

Are there out-and-out good and bad characters in the story, or is everyone more nuanced than that?
The characters develop throughout the play. Sometimes they are good, sometimes they make poor decisions which ultimately lead to bad actions and bad outcomes. I don’t feel that any of the characters is wholly good or wholly bad, much like the rest of us. Eddie is no hero, but he is no villain either.

How is everything at Kelvin HQ?
Kelvin is going from strength to strength. Our membership is around 140, the highest it has been for some time, we are usually around 100 to 120. We have plans to build a new entrance on Wesley Road which will give us a better box office and more space in the bar area. Work is due to start in mid-October and be finished before our December production, On Golden Pond.
Artistically, we tackle a variety of plays. We did James and the Giant Peach recently; next year we plan to do Terry Pratchett’s Postal as well as returning to Tobacco Factory Theatres with Anne Boleyn. In the past we have covered the full range of theatre, from Tennessee Williams to Jean-Paul Sartre. We have done costume dramas as well as devised plays and we often premier one-act plays written by Kelvin members. If it has been written, we will have a stab at it!

A View from the Bridge is at the Kelvin Players Studio Theatre, Gloucester Rd from Wed, Oct 11 to Sat, Oct 14 and Wed, Oct 18 to Sat, Oct 21. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.kelvinplayers.co.uk

Read more: Preview: The Weir, Bristol Old Vic