A Strong reminder of all that we miss
A View From The Bridge (NTLive, in cinemas from Thursday)
Verdict: Handsomely austere ★★★★★
The Hound Of The Baskervilles (Watermill Theatre Gardens, Newbury)
Verdict: Ideal Holmes ★★★★✩
Watching Rosie (original theatre online.com)
Verdict: Ten minutes well spent ★★★★✩
THIS fabulous production of A View From The Bridge, Arthur Miller’s drama about Italian immigrants in New York after the war, should perhaps come with a viewer warning: ‘May make you yearn too strongly for the red meat of live theatre.’
It stars the always terrific Mark Strong, and is the sort of raw, elemental live performance we used to take for granted before lockdown. Catching the Young Vic Theatre’s 2015 staging again, on screen, made me realise just how badly I miss seeing great plays live.
Directed by Ivo van Hove, it’s the tale of an Italian dock worker Eddie Carbone (Strong) who takes a couple of illegal Sicilian immigrants into his home. Unfortunately, one of them, Rodolpho, takes a fancy to Eddie’s beloved niece, who’s lived with Eddie and his wife (Nicola Walker) since her mother died when she was a baby. Worse still for Eddie, his niece likes Rodolpho, too. A lot.
Normally the play is done with a good deal of furniture. Here, there is none — except for a single chair, brought on ceremoniously for a machoman lifting contest.
Instead, van Hove’s handsomely austere production is a quasi-religious experience invoking Greek and Japanese classical theatre, and set in a stark designer bear pit, with actors wearing costumes in 50 shades of grey.
This makes the play look bleakly ritualistic, but it also makes the story focus on the acting. And, my God, what acting!
I liked Strong well enough when I saw the show at the Young Vic. But maybe because I’ve been undergoing theatrical cold turkey for four months; or maybe because his performance had matured by the time it reached the West End, where this was filmed, this time he simply blew me away.
Strong is like a hunted animal, and his character’s tragedy is that of a man who becomes that most despised of things: a possessive, toughguy patriarch.
And while the woke among us may not feel for his emotional flaying, more warmblooded creatures will be filled with pity, and fear.
Nicola Walker burns with intensity as his neglected wife, and we see Phoebe Fox as the teenage niece grow up before our eyes over the two hours.
Michael Gould frames the action nicely as the Philip Marlowe-esque lawyer-narrator who tries, and fails, to bring Eddie to reason.
Emun Elliott is quietly terrifying, too, as Eddie’s eventual executioner. Together, they left me pining for the unmediated joy of real theatre. Until that returns, this should sit well in cinemas.
THE Watermill’s delightfully dippy adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dartmoor whodunnit, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, has plenty of charm.
A perfect accompaniment to a picnic or cream tea (served at socially distanced tables, with chilled wine on demand), the Sherlock caper is a combo of food and fun that’s simply alimentary, my dear Watson.
Devised with three actors, the show observes social distancing, too, but also, cleverly, lampoons it. To avoid contact, the trio use tricks such as miming flinging a letter across the stage only for the recipient to ‘catch’ it, by plucking a replica from their pocket.
Abigail Pickard Price’s production uses only a few crates and chairs, while all the characters are played, at different times, by all the actors (Victoria Blunt, Rosalind Lailey and James Mack). Luckily you can tell them apart by their hats. Tickets are selling fast, so pray
for an Indian summer... and additional shows. Or hold out for the Watermill’s next garden venture: the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot.
IF ENTERPRISE awards are handed out at the end of lockdown, the Original Theatre Company will top my list. To follow their recent Zoom adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, they’re airing an amiable ditty about dementia (I know — but it’s true!).
Miriam Margolyes plays an elderly lady in lockdown who thinks the granddaughter she’s talking to on her laptop is literally inside a television — and may have met Ant and Dec while in there.
She also tries to introduce her — online — to the young man dropping food parcels at her front door. The reality of dementia may be less charming, but the show is raising money for Dementia UK, so it’s ten minutes well spent.