Arthur Miller A View From The Bridge

(4.5 stars; 6 reviews)

Martin Jarvis directs Arthur Miller's 1955 award-winning masterpiece. Recorded in the US for Drama On 3. Alfred Molina won the BBC Drama Awards Best Actor accolade as Eddie Carbone. He leads an all-star American cast. Universal themes: family, guilt, loyalty, sexual attraction, jealousy - and love. A timeless reminder as immigrants from Syria, Eritrea, Libya currently seek new lives, new dreams. Here, it's the American one.
Setting. An Italian-American neighbourhood near the Brooklyn Bridge, New York. 1950s. A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller examines the way in which Eddie Carbone causes his own downfall through his weakness. Can anybody prevent it? Lawyer Alfieri (our narrator) confides to listeners there are cases where he can only watch as they run their bloody course.
Longshoreman Eddie Carbone lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece, Catherine, in a Brooklyn tenement. He has a love of, almost an obsession with, 17 year-old Catherine. Beatrice's Italian cousins are being smuggled into the country. The family hide the illegal immigrants, Marco and Rodolpho, while they work on the docks. Eddie's increasing suspicion and jealousy of Rodolpho's developing relationship with Catherine eventually leads to betrayal and a tragic confrontation. Eddie Carbone: Alfred Molina Alfieri: Hector Elizondo Beatrice Carbone: Jane Kaczmarek Catherine: Melissa Benoist Marco: Reid Scott Rodolpho: Matthew Wolf Louis: Andre Sogliuzzo Tony: Andre Sogliuzzo First Immigration Officer: Andre Sogliuzzo Mike: Darren Richardson Second Immigration Officer:Darren Richardson Sound design: Wesley Dewberry and Mark Holden
A Jarvis & Ayres Production. Director: Martin Jarvis Producer: Rosalind Ayres Drama on 3: A View from the Bridge Duration: 1 hour, 35 minutes First broadcast: Sunday 18th October 2015, 21:00 on BBC Radio 3 Arthur Miller has written a number of essays, articles, and studies with critical tone or deep thoughts that have as profound an impact on his readers as his plays on theater audiences. In this volume, we have collected previously unpublished works, sometimes of an autobiographical nature, which clearly embellish certain events of the second half of the 20th century with dramatic cruelty and sometimes engineering precision. Some of the essays shed light on the astonishing background of events that have occupied the world once and since then, while his other works depict scenes from the life of an increasingly successful writer. Miller formed an interesting, sometimes shocking view of World War II, the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the events in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. He was very busy, [Goodreads]

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.