Preview: A View from the Bridge, Tobacco Factory Theatres

Following its production of Macbeth (see our review here), the second production in the inaugural Factory Company season at Tobacco Factory Theatres is Arthur Miller’s tense 1955 Italian-American drama A View from the Bridge.

The in-the-round production will be directed by the theatre’s Artistic Director Mike Tweddle in his first production for Tobacco Factory Theatres.

Eddie Carbone is an honourable, hard-working man who has raised his niece Catherine like a daughter and loves her like nothing else. When his wife’s cousins arrive from Italy he’s proud to offer them safe harbour, but when Catherine falls for one of them, Eddie’s dark and dangerous struggle begins to surface.

As well as linked Get Involved activity connecting the production with audiences, the show features a Get On Stage community company joining the professional cast, taking on small roles in the production following a ten-week acting course.

Here’s Mike to tell us more.

How has the Factory Company fared in its first season?
Macbeth has been an extraordinary success for us and generated amazing audience responses. It’s an atmospheric and technical powerhouse of a show and required enormous amounts of emotional input and stamina from the cast and crew to pull it off for the six-week run.
They are complete heroes, especially given they were also rehearsing three days each week for A View From the Bridge. We’ve learned that the most important thing in delivering a season like this, and preserving its quality, is to look after our team. Without this amazing team the show simply doesn’t happen.

Tell us about A View From the Bridge, and what made you want to stage it as part of the first Factory Company season.
The play is a family story and focuses on an Italian immigrant family who have settled and are making a life for themselves in Red Hook, New York in the 1950s. Miller uses this beautifully simple background to examine the choices we make when our world is threatened, when the things we love could be taken away from us – and how we re-adjust our own principles and morals when put under extreme pressure.
It’s a beautiful piece. Every word on the page is carefully designed to move this story along like a juggernaut towards its end. The story plunges you to profound emotional depths and propels forward with breathtaking momentum. I was excited to place such a powerful and intimate play in our Factory Theatre – a space where the audience feels immersed and included in the action.

It’s utterly action-packed and thrilling, and features the terrible demise of a flawed man and the impact on wider society. Miller’s writing is perfect. He tells a domestic story with microscopic detail and insight, at the same time as offering a powerful political critique that raises vital questions around immigration, gender and morality. And he doesn’t stop for breath!

Tell us a little about the Get On Stage programme. 
It’s been so exciting to work with a cast drawn from a community that immediately surrounds Tobacco Factory Theatres. Right from the start we knew this play needed to feel as if the whole of society had come to witness Eddie’s downfall, and so it felt completely fitting that our local community should play the faces seen around Eddie’s Red Hook in New York.
Since January, we’ve led a weekly theatre course for 26 adults aged 20 to 70, most of whom haven’t acted or been on stage before. The course culminates now with them performing in this production, with five group members on stage each night. Their different perspectives and ideas have developed our understanding of the play, and helped us draw connections between 1950s Brooklyn and 21st-century Bristol.
The groups have learned so much about the professional rehearsal process, and a wide array of acting skills beyond that. But perhaps most importantly, staff members, the professional cast and our community cast – the Get On Stage participants – have become friends through a shared creative adventure. And our production is all the richer for it.

Macbeth was unique in its intense sensory impact and strong visual staging. Does A View From the Bridge have a similar aesthetic?
Macbeth was designed to immerse the spectator totally. We wanted to drop each audience member right into the heart of Macbeth’s world.
Without wanting to give too much away, A View From the Bridge will feel very different. It will still be technically intricate, and visually playful and powerful, but it will also feel more stripped back to the bare bones. Whilst there will be gorgeous physical references to the world the Carbones live in, we wanted to leave more space for interpretation of the text through the actors’ performances. However, as with Macbeth, our aim has been to achieve a level of intimacy that only a space like the Factory Theatre in the round can allow.

You’ve talked about AVftB offering ‘a powerful political critique that raises vital questions around immigration, gender and morality’. Does your production stress this political aspect?
Yes – by telling the stories and perspectives of all the characters and their individual tragedies, with integrity and specificity. There’s no doubt that the presence of our local community on stage will create further resonance with a contemporary audience that we could not have achieved without them. The ‘society’ that we create should feel as if it spans both worlds, the one in which Eddie lives out a tragedy of epic personal proportions but also our world now and the local and global community in which we find ourselves today.

What do you hope to send audiences away thinking and feeling?
An array of wildly different feelings and opinions that create vital, vigorous debate in the bar afterwards! Miller is so astute in that no one is ever fully labelled the bad guy. You can see yourself in his characters, you can sympathise with them at the same time as violently opposing what they are doing. We very much hope that people will be left trying to see all sides of this unenviable tragedy.

A View from the Bridge is at Tobacco Factory Theatres until Saturday, May 12. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/view-bridge-arthur-miller
Rehearsal shots: John Dawson Photography