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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 185 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 185, April 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A View From the Bridge
by Arthur Miller
A View From the Bridge is a staggeringly straightforward play. Eddie Carbone is a man who has worked his fingers to the bone on the New York waterfront.
He harbours illegal immigrants from Sicily in his apartment while they find their feet. Eddie is profoundly in love with his niece and doesn’t want her to grow up and meet young men. Catherine does indeed fall in love with a handsome and talented young Sicilian immigrant.
The rest of the play deals with Eddie’s jealousy and obsession with his niece. He drives himself to commit what is seen as the most terrible of crimes in the self-protective Italian community: he blabs to the immigration department in a desperate attempt to rid himself of the young Sicilian.
America had a reputation for welcoming the world’s dispossessed migrants with the fine words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me / I lift my lamp beside the golden door’.
The reality behind the golden door was very different. Men left their families in Europe to illegally enter America and work for low wages under terrible conditions. This life was one of inconsistent employment, poverty and alcoholism, being deported by the harsh department of immigration.
Miller evokes the atmosphere of the 1950s McCarthy witch hunts against Communists. He was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to admit Communist sympathies or name names. His refusal to do so led to a fine and suspended sentence.
As a response, Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about the 17th century Salem witch hunts, and the following year A View from the Bridge where Eddie Carbone loses all respect for the betrayal of his friends.
The play is written in the form of a Greek tragedy where a man is set on a course of destruction. This is its greatest weakness as it deems that the characters can have no control or any choice in their lives.
Eddie Carbone’s destiny is helped on its way by his inability to express his genuinely deep felt emotions towards his niece, which is cleverly underlined by the dumb gaping windows of the set. Later the empty windows seem to symbolise the open mouths of traitors in the community who speak out from a wall of silence.
Much of the pent up emotion is inarticulate and needs performances from the guts that this production lacks. It could easily have been a play about a working class man who lashes out at a society that has stunted his emotion, but Miller loses his anger by dragging Eddie towards his mortal destiny.
Plays at Birmingham Repertory Theatre then at the Savoy Theatre, Aldwych, London from 5 April.
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