GAZZA said:
denislawsbackheel said:
GAZZA said:
Yes Gazza, both Marlowe and the subject of his play, Edward II, were gay.
You clever boy.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pseudointellectual
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<a class="postlink" href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moron" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moron</a><br /><br />-- Wed May 25, 2011 10:14 pm --<br /><br />just for Gazza
A View From The Bridge
Times Review
Wednesday 25th May 2011
Eddie Carbone, a New York longshoreman, is up there with Othello as a tragic hero. In a political play, Arthur Miller, involved with the 1940s dockside unions, could have made him a victim of circumstance: but it is ancient inner demons that destroy Eddie. As Alfieri, the lawyer-narrator (played with sombre dignity by Ian Redford) pronounces: “He was as good a man as he had to be, in the life that he lived.”
Sarah Frankcom’s spare, strong revival serves Miller perfectly. At its best this round theatre is an arena where human stories unfold as tense as gladiatorial bouts. James Cotterill’s minimal set suggests all we need: grinding, clanging dock sounds echo round a fire-escape, a family table and a leaking hydrant. Tiny details amplify the life within: Eddie holds a whisky bottle to his head like a gun, his wife Beatrice wraps Nativity figures, niece Catherine sews a blouse. Sexual tension and suspicion are evoked, never milked. It is a masterclass in honest, modest direction.
Con O’Neill plays Eddie, a weary docker in his undershirt, proud from decades of hard, hungry work providing for his women: he demands obedience but gives in to them with sudden affection. Catherine (Leila Mimmack) is spreading her wings in a new job; two cousins, illegal immigrants from impoverished Sicily, arrive to sleep on the floor and find work, and he is proud of that, too. Warmth spreads up from their homely table as Eddie crams bread in his mouth and joshes his wife that he’ll have to give up his bed again: “As soon as you see a tired relative, I end up on the floor.”
O’Neill is magnificent: driven, troubled, increasingly and even comically upset by the boy Rodolpho wooing the niece for whom he has a dangerous love. The newcomers, with heavy Italian accent and manners, are excellent: the blond Ronan Raftery as Rodolpho, charming the birds off the trees, and dark Marco (Nitzan Sharron), stiff with pride and fear for his distant family. But Beatrice is really electrifying: Anna Francolini, last seen condemned to play Callas in that grim Onassis, tracks the decline of her husband with housewifely watchfulness, then pain as she is torn between niece and husband, finally with heroic love. Never a wrong note.
Miller’s beautiful balance of realism and rhetoric is respected, given life. When Alfieri says of Eddie, “His eyes were like tunnels . . . a passion had moved into his body like a stranger”, you shudder for the ancient, perverse, pure destruction to come.
