Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge

They've barely paused for breath since the re-opening of the new Everyman, and now sister theatre the Playhouse is preparing for another big show that will open its new season in style this week. Do these people ever sleep?! Arthur Miller’s devastating portrait of an ordinary man in a clash of cultures, of generations and of moral duty, A View From The Bridge opens this Thursday (March 27) and runs until April 19. Directed by Quercus Award-winning Everyman and Playhouse associate director Charlotte Gwinner, it features Lloyd Hutchinson as Eddie Carbone and Julia Ford - last seen on stage in Liverpool as Lady Macbeth at the Everyman - as his wife Beatrice. It's 1954 New York, and buried in the heart of the docking community on the seaward side of Brooklyn Bridge is the small neighbourhood of Red Hook - a close-knit Italian American community, rich in culture, with a big heart and strong family ties. A place where men work and women keep house, and where honour and loyalty are the order of the day. On the waterfront, Eddie Carbone is working hard and keeping his head down. Together with wife Beatrice they’ve raised their niece, Catherine, from a small child. Now they’ve taken in Beatrice’s Sicilian cousins, Marco and Rodolpho. But times are changing and Eddie’s losing his grip. Director Charlotte Gwinner was previously associate director at the Bush Theatre from 2009 to 2011, and is the founder and artistic director of Angle Theatre. Her credits include Bytes (Royal Court), Taking Part (Criterion Theatre), Benefactors (Sheffield Crucible Studio) and Our New Girl (Bush Theatre). She said: “Liverpool is the perfect setting for this play, with its history of the docks, its close-knit community and its sense of family; it shares the same DNA as A View From The Bridge. I am really looking forward to directing this play on the extraordinary Playhouse stage, where the sound of seagulls and distant ship horns can literally be heard outside and where the proscenium arch becomes an epic frame for Miller’s devastating portrait of an ordinary man.” The work of Arthur Miller, of course, has been a perennial favourite at the Playhouse, with productions of All My Sons and The Price also having been staged in the last decade. Lloyd Hutchinson’s theatre credits include Collaborators and The Observer (National Theatre), Measure For Measure (Almeida) and Boris Godunov, Troilus and Cressida (RSC). The cast also includes Bruce Alexander; Andy Apollo; former EastEnders baddie Daniel Coonan; our own Denise Kennedy (most recently seen touring her one-woman show Bella: Queen of the Blackfriars Ring) and Liam Tobin (The Games, Spike Theatre); Shannon Tarbet, and Tom Peters. For tickets and more info, visit the Playhouse website.