Arthur Miller's A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE Comes to Ensemble Theatre

Ensemble Theatre will stage Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge with the original cast and creative team from Red Line Productions' sell out 2017 season.

Mark Kilmurry, Artistic Director of Ensemble Theatre said I was blown away when I saw this production at the Old Fitz produced by Red Line. This is a stunning take on Arthur Miller's classic play directed by Iain Sinclair (Whose Afraid Of Virginia Woolf) with an amazing cast. I am thrilled we are presenting this again for our audiences to enjoy.

A View from the Bridge, even though written in the 1950s, talks about issues which are still contemporary added Mark Kilmurry.

Eddie Carbone is devoted to his wife Beatrice and his niece Catherine. When Beatrice's cousins Marco and Rodolpho enter the US illegally, desperate to find work having fled the poverty of Sicily, the pair is welcomed into the Carbone home. But as Rodolpho and Catherine fall in love, Eddie's adoration of his niece is no longer touching, but terrifying.

Simmering with jealousy and obsession, Italian-American immigrant life of 1950s Brooklyn colours Miller's searing drama of tragic proportions. The universal story of family, immigration and justice cuts deeply in this gripping, award-winning independent production from the Old Fitz Theatre.

Prior to writing A View from the Bridge, Arthur Miller had a direct interest in the Brooklyn waterfront where the play is set. He conducted extensive research into Red Hook, a dangerous and corrupt world where gangland crime was rife, investigating a young dockworker called Pete Panto who was murdered for challenging corrupt union leadership. The result of his research was a screenplay of 1950, The Hook - but Miller abandoned it after Hollywood producers demanded fundamental changes which, for Miller, compromised the integrity of the story. However, during this research, he heard a tale which directly informed the plot of A View from the Bridge: a longshoreman who had ratted to the Immigration Bureau on two brothers, his own relatives, who were living illegally in his very home, in order to break an engagement between one of them and his niece.

This was in 1947. Eight years later Miller would return to this story as the foundation for his play, where longshoreman Eddie Carbone, his wife Beatrice and niece Catherine take in Beatrice's Italian relatives, Marco and Rodolpho, who have entered the country illegally for a new life in America. American immigration laws were such that quotas were set for different nationalities, and the only option for many was to enter the country illegally, with those in the shipping trade profiting from their passage.

This astonishingly lucid tragedy of ancient Greek proportions is purpose built by Arthur Miller to purify the audience in the time honoured way, by catharsis. The old gods have laws that extend far beyond those set down by mortal men. When fate chooses you, you had better get a lawyer, you better get a real good one. This is Arthur Miller at the top of his game said Iain Sinclair, Director of A View from the Bridge.

BOOKINGS: 02 9929 0644 or www.ensemble.com.au
RUNNING TIME: Approx. 2 hours, no interval.

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