Ivo van Hove’s A View From the Bridge

In his preface to Miss Julie Strindberg talked about "new wine" bursting “the old bottles." Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge might be an example of putting old wine in new bottles, placing a classic Greek Tragedy in the mode of Sophocles’ Oedipus in a modern setting. Ivo van Hove’s direction of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge now takes another kind of vintage wine, in the form of the Miller script, and pouring it in a yet an even newer bottle. Vessels themselves speak for antiquity and there are a lot of them in the current Young Vic production along with some other anomalies such as a beating drum and a narrator (Michael Gould) who functions as Greek chorus--though one of the unintentional anomalies, that of English actors and actresses like Michael Strong (Eddie Carbone) and Phoebe Fox (Catharine) trying to fake Brooklyn accents, can interrupt the viewers willing suspension of disbelief. It’s hard to tell if A View From the Bridge stands the test of time in the way that Death of a Salesman does.  Eddie’s repeated “The guy ain’t right,” which is said about Rodolfo (Russell Tovey), the man his niece wishes to marry, is no match for the haunting mantra of Salesman, “Attention must be paid.” But it’s the set itself that constitutes the originality of this particular production. The simple white stage, designed by Jan Versweyveld, like Sally Jacobs' famous white box used in Peter Brook’s l970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the solo door exit at center functions as a canvas on which the tragedy will play itself out. Those familiar with the work of the painter Adolf Gottlieb might experience a shock of recognition as an explosive red ball of blood appears against a stark white background. Gottlieb’s work may not have influenced the director’s imagination. However, the impulse to see Greek tragedy, however realistically updated, as a turbulent, boundary breaking abstract expressionist painting might ultimately be the legacy of van Hove’s interpretation of the Miller classic.The current rendering gives new meaning to the term “family entertainment."

The Suit

We had Gogol’s The Overcoat and now we have Can Themba, Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney’s Simon’s The Suit, directed by Peter Brook, Marie-Helene Estienne and Franck Krawczyk at BAM. The comparisons are hard to ignore. In the classic Gogol short story a civil servant named Akaky Akakievich has his hard won overcoat stolen. In the current production, The Suit is the iconic object and its fate is personification. Philemon (William Nadylam), a South African lawyer in Sophiatown outside of Johannesberg, can neither forget nor forgive after he learns of his wife Matlida’s (Nonhlanhla Kheswa) infidelity and the suit, left behind in haste, becomes a permanent if unwanted member of the household— Matilda's Scarlet Letter. Philemon also recalls Orpheus since he loses his love when he can’t help looking back--in this case at her deed. The Suit is a chamber musical, a piece of folk theater that relates a parable about lovers who become emblematic figures, their individual fates mirroring the condition of blacks in South Africa during Apartheid. Philemon is content with the existence he leads and yet Matilda is not willing to accept and her tragedy is the fate of the dreamer who's unwilling to accept her present world. The oddity of the play and the current production is the equation of sexual and political liberation. Is Matilda’s punishment tantamount to political repression? Adultery may be the expression of the desire for a better life, but it’s unwieldy when it becomes a symbol for the kind of freedom the play alludes to.  

Faust: A Love Story

Faust: A Love Story, which recently played at BAM is as the production notes say inspired by Goethe and Marlowe, but it also owes a good deal to Peter Brook’s famous production of Midsummer Night’s Dream in which some actors swung on trapezes. In Faust: A Love Story, the fantasy elements are played out on a huge trampoline that creates the feeling of a spider’s web and also suggests the influence of Cirque du Soleil. The production notes credit The Master and Margarita, Murnau’s Faust (1926) and The Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil,” but the uncredited relation to Shakespeare is what is what is most apparent in this recitation of the Faust myth by Vesturport Theatre and the Reykjavik City Theater directed by Gisli Orn Gardarsson--no matter that this dream also involves the hell described by Mephistopheles when he says to Faust, “Life never satisfied you so that you asked that a pathetic moment last forever.” Ground zero for Faust: A Love Story is a nursing home, where our Johann (played by Thorsteinn Gunnarsson), the prototype for Dr. Johann Georg Faust, the alchemist on whom the Faust legend was created, is a convalescing actor who has played every role but Faust. Johann’s hopeless infatuation for Greta (Unnar Osp Stefansdottir), one of the nurses at the home, is what motivates this Faust to sell his soul. Despite all the acrobatics, it is a curiosity of the current production that the actual staging of the story with its ageless Walpurgisnacht  (rendered brilliantly in Kurosawa's Ikiru by the way), never gets off the ground.