Peter Viney's Blog

By Arthur Miller

Directed by Holly Race Roughan
Set and Costume design by Moi Tran
Lighting design by Alex Fernandes

Co-Production Chichester Festival Theatre, Headlong, Octagon Bolton, Rose Kingston

Chichester Festival Theatre
Tuesday 17th October 2023, 14.30

CAST
Jonathan Slinger- Eddie Carbone
Kirsty Bushell- Beatrice Carbone
Rachelle Diedericke- Catherine
Nancy Crane- Alfieri
Luke Newberry- Rodolfo
Tommy Sim’aan – Marco
Elijah Holloway – Louis / Immigration Officer / Dancer
Lamin Touray – Mike / Immigration Officer

We are seeing this on Arthur Miller’s birthday. 108 today if he were still with us. Karen is avoiding bright lights after eye surgery, so I’m seeing it with my eighteen year old grandson. Death of A Salesman was his mum’s favourite play ever. He has read The Crucible carefully at school. I was first in A View From The Bridge when I was nineteen.

It’s a favourite play of mine, I think the best Arthur Miller, and I like all Arthur Miller. I’ve written at length about some of my history with it (I know Marco’s part well enough to finish lines), as well as the issues of accents and pronunciation (Carbone or Carbone-ay). See the Young Vic 2014 review here.

It’s about a tightly knit Italian family in Red Hook Brooklyn. Red Hook is the area on the seaward side of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking down from above. It was where the Italian-American dock workers lived. You can’t bend that much or modernise. I have noted that in Brien Friel plays, directors stick to Irish accents, and don’t venture into ethnic diversity. This is as definitely Italian-American as Friel is Irish, and Sicilian, Puglian or Calabrian-American too. It’s as heavy as the oldest of tragedies. Honour. Respect. Betrayal. Revenge. Men of Honour. The honour of a name. The name is shamed. Only blood will resolve it.

The cast really need to look Italian. It’s a hard one for a casting director. Rodolfo has to be slight, very blonde and be able to hit a tenor’s high notes. Marco needs to be physically strong and look it. Catherine needs to look very young. Having a BAME actor works here because she’s light-skinned, and we only need one parent to be Italian-American … she is Beatrice’s sister’s orphaned daughter. Making one longshoreman (i.e. docker) a BAME actor works, though if you were doing it as a film, you would consider the point in the play that dock work is a monopoly of the Syndicate … i.e. Mafia, and they are unlikely to have had equal opportunities employment.

Then Marco and Rodolfo are new arrivals. Submarines. Illegal immigrants newly arrived from Italy. To me that means they must both look Italian and have Italian accents … in 2014 the Young Vic just had them sounding American. That really annoyed me. They also had ‘Carbone’ not Carbone-ay’ which annoyed me more (see above link). This 2023 production gets both right. It’s also impossible to shift it far from its 1955-56 context. Southern Italy was intrinsically poor, and then worse in the aftermath of the war. Italians could be illegals seeking work at that point. Move on a few years and all things Italian were cool. Sophia Loren, Lambrettas, ice cream, Pasolini, Fellini.

This is a co-production with Headlong, Rose Kingston and Octagon Bolton. I suspect Chichester is the largest stage of the four. A gender casting switch (inevitable in 2023) is making Alfieri the lawyer female. Alfieri functions as a Greek chorus to the tragedy, a deliberate choice by Miller who was inspired visiting a Greek theatre. Miller’s first one act version in 1955 was in verse, before he was persuaded to make it a full-length play in prose. Here the gender switch works seamlessly, though I worry about A level students writing about ‘Mrs Alfieri’ in exams, but then they should have read it as well as watching it.

The set first. It’s shiny glossy black on the stage, with metal stairs to a platform with a row of eight cinema style seats (only two get used at the same time). That works well, and Alfieri gets to sit in various areas. Characters may be on stage when there not part of a scene. What is odd is a huge neon scarlet RED HOOK sign dominating the stage which is reflected on the floor. The photo is before the start. There is no yellow visible from the eyes, just red, but the camera picks up yellow. We both tried it.

It’s a totally bizarre choice. Was it an attempt to make it look more modern? Red Hook is a tenement area, not a night club. If they switched it off after the start, it might have made sense but it’s aways there. With the reflections from the glossy floor, I think it’s a daft and distracting idea marring a good set concept otherwise. The fact that the district is ‘red hook’ is arcane anyway, though at the end they use a longshoreman’s hook rather than the usual knife and there’s a lot of blood, so maybe it’s supposed to predict that. Certainly the long hook is more terrifying than a knife. But no, I still don’t think it makes sense.

There is a swing, which is used as a seat by Eddie, Beatrice and Catherine. Catherine swings slowly on it for five minutes before the play begins.

The costumes are coherent and do make sense. The men are all in grey denim … or heavily washed out black, set against the black gloss stage. The women are in pale grey / beige / grey-blue.

The cast. Jonathan Slinger and Kirsty Bushell were both in the RSCThe Tempest in 2012 as I was starting these reviews. He was a memorable Prospero at 39. She was a gender-switched Sebastian. A 39 year old Prospero? Well, Miranda is 15. It makes sense. At the RSC in fast succession he was Hamlet, Macbeth, Malvolio, Parolles (All’s Well That Ends Well). His Hamlet as the nerd in the upstairs bedroom was innovative. Kirsty Bushell was also Olivia to his Malvolio. They were both in The Comedy of Errors the same year (Adriana and Dr Pinch).

Eleven years on, and they are an astonishing double act. Jonathan Slinger is the best Eddie Carbone I’ve seen. Kirsty Bushell is the best Beatrice. The 2014 Young Vic production, also with a bare stage, garnered awards. From the acting aspect, this one is even better all round.

I looked at reviews, one thought him not big enough. Nonsense. He projects fierceness and also he really should be smaller than Marco. Another complained about slipping American accents. I’m a stickler for this, I noticed a couple of single word slips from most of the cast, but as American accents from a British cast go, not one of them troubled me. The costumes help. He is the Eddie Carbone of my imagination. Kirsty Bushell’s Beatrice radiates frustration, playing with her skirt hem, appealing to him without sparking anything.

Eddie: I want my respect, Beatrice, and you know what I’m talking about.
Beatrice: What?
Eddie (finally his reactions harden) What I feel like doin’ in the bed, and what I don’t feel like doin’. I don’t want no…
Beatrice: When’d I say anything about it?
Eddie:You said. You said. I ain’t deaf. I don’t want no more conversations about that, Beatrice. I do what I feel like doin’ or what I don’t feel like doin’

Both put full energy into the play throughout. The facial asides, gestures are so much a part of it. They must have been exhausted and this was a matinee. A Tuesday matinee is unusual, but Chichester seems to be adding matinees as the nights draw in. Given the age profile (I include myself) of afternoon audiences this makes sense and they get the numbers. I’m fine with night driving after an evening play, but I’m NOT fine with the constant road closures and long diversions after 8 pm on the M27. It’s a fact of life and Chichester draws audiences from a wide area … 65 miles each way for us.

Rachelle Diedericke is a marvellous and touching Catherine (white socks are a good idea). She was Mary Warren in the National Theatre The Crucible last year. She reacts in confusion as Eddie finds her knee length skirt too short. Her heels too high. Her innocence is far too much to take a job a block from the navy yard. Eddie’s suppressed sexual interest in his niece and his subsequent inability to satisfy his wife are portrayed with clarity. It’s supposed to be unconscious, he fights it back, he can’t believe it himself. But it’s hanging there all the time.

Alfieri: We all love somebody, the wife, the kids – every man’s got somebody that he loves, heh? But sometimes … there’s too much. You know? There’s too much, and it goes where it mustn’t. A man works hard, he brings up a child, sometimes it’s a niece, sometimes even a daughter, and he never realizes it, but over the years – there is too much love for the daughter, there is too much love for the niece. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?

A View From The Bridge, Act One

Luke Newberry can sing Paper Doll and hit all the high notes as Rodolfo. He’s physically right though they had to dye his hair! Incidentally, when so many people are credited, why doesn’t Johnny S. Black as the writer of Paper Doll deserve a programme credit? It is one of the rare group of songs that sold over ten million copies.

Equally Tommy Sim’aan was Marco, and he nailed it. The chair lift show of strength is surprisingly hard to do. I used to tone up my arm for a week. I wouldn’t say there’s a knack to it but when you get over the initial surprise it’s not as hard as the first time you try.

Miller’s stage direction is: He gets on one knee with one hand behind his back and grasps the bottom of one of the chair legs.

The arm behind the back makes it harder to balance yourself. The back legs are easier than the front and he’s holding the back leg in this version. The Young Vic version in 2014 also used the back leg hold. I used to be able to do it (not now!) with the front which means you have the leverage of the weight at the back to contend with. What you really need is an Eddie Carbone who does the struggling well, and they had it. That’s a different chair in the photo. It has a curved back and a cane seat (which is cheating … I’ve done it). On this Chichester show the chair was black, rectangular back with a solid seat. Maybe he had to work up to it.

Nancy Crane convinced me as (Mrs)( Alfieri too. I thought being a woman assisted her interviews with Eddie, but possibly detracted from her final speech. The crucial ‘too much love’ speech one is that Eddie might have taken better from a woman than a man. The Greek chorus aspect is crucial. She tells us that she knows what’s going to happen, emphasising the inevitability.

The cast all worked. On acting it’s easily a five star production, I’d say the best I’ve seen.

Where it drops a star is three areas. First is that red neon sign in your face.

The second is unique to this production. As well as playing the one of the longshoremen sneering and laughing about Rodolfo, Elijah Holloway adds dancing. Full on balletic dancing on points too, and he’s obviously extremely good. He dances around at various moments, twirling provocatively near Eddie too. May I say it’s not in the script? What’s the rationale? We know that Eddie casts homophobic comments on Rodolfo’s high singing voice, fancy clothing (new shirts, pointed shoes), dress making ability (some productions show Beatrice dressmaking. This doesn’t). The big moment in the play is when Eddie kisses Rodolfo on the mouth which is supposed to make a punk of him, reveal him as homosexual. It just causes shock to Rodolfo.

It’s all in the text, ‘He ain’t right!’ Eddie protests to Alfieri. The text does everything you need to enable you to draw your own conclusions. I don’t think there is any indication that Rodolfo is gay, it’s all in Eddie’s jealous mind. I worked with a rock band. I had hair past my shoulders. We were wolf-whistled from building sites, comments were made. The thing is that most rock bands of the era were not only heterosexual but more successful at being so than the wolf whistlers and cat callers.

So what’s the ballet dancing for? Is it to show how Eddie imagines Rodolfo? Is it supposed to show that homophobic ‘gay bashers’ are simply refusing to own up to their own homosexual feelings? The original text is a classic. A masterpiece. It really doesn’t need a director trying to telegraph possible messages to us. Telegraph? Hit the audience over the head with a perplexing hammer.

The third is the mist at start and end, while the four chairs are placed theatrically on the stage at the start, and removed at the end. Too ‘arty’ for the play.

None of those things should stop anybody seeing it, but it’s why the summing up is four stars with five star acting.

****

The 2024 version is a must see with Dominic West

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

four star
Mark Fisher, The Guardian ****
Gary Naylor, Broadway World ****
Nick Wayne, West End Best Friend ****
Libby Purves, British Theatre.com ****
three star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ***
two star
Clive Davis, The Times **

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

ARTHUR MILLER
The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Old Vic 2014
The Crucible, National Theatre 2022
The Price, Theatre Royal Bath 2018
All My Sons by Arthur Miller, Talawa Theatre at Salisbury Playhouse
A View From The Bridge by Arthur Miller, Young Vic 2014
A View From The Bridge, Chichester, 2023
A View From The Bridge, Theatre Royal Haymarket 2024
Death of A Salesman, by Arthur Miller, RSC 2015

JONATHAN SLINGER
Macbeth, RSC 2011 as Macbeth
The Tempest RSC 2012 as Prospero
Comedy of Errors RSC ’12  as Dr Pinch
Twelfth Night RSC 2012    as Malvolio
Hamlet RSC 2013  as Hamlet
All’s Well That Ends Well RSC 2013 as Paroles
Plastic, by Marius von Mayenburg, Bath 2017
Absolute Hell, National, 2018
The Provoked Wife, RSC2019
The Salisbury Poisonings (TV) 2020

KIRSTY BUSHELL
Richard III, RSC 2022 (Queen Elizabeth)
King Lear, Chichester Minerva, 2017 (Regan)
Romeo & Juliet, Globe 2017 (Juliet)
Hedda Gabler, Salisbury 2016 (Hedda)
The White Devil by John Webster, RSC 2014 (Vittoria)
The Tempest, RSC 2012 (Sebastian)
Twelfth Night, RSC 2012 (Olivia)
Comedy of Errors, RSC 2012 (Adriana)

RACHELLE DIEDERICKE
The Crucible, National Theatre 2022 (Mary Warren)

TOMMY SIM’AAN
The Tempest, RSC 2023 (Caliban)

LUKE NEWBERRY
The Merry Wives of Windsor, RSC 2018 (Fenton)
Macbeth, RSC 2018 (Malcolm)