Fintan O'Toole reviews A View from the Bridge at the Gate Theatre, Dublin. Siobhán Long reviews Siamsa Tíre's production of Oileán at the Pavilion in Dún Laoghaire.
A View from the Bridge, Gate Theatre, Dublin
It is easy to dismiss the current trend for casting film and television stars in stage plays as the theatrical equivalent of breast enhancement surgery, trading authenticity for instant allure. The problem is that while not all movie stars can act, many of them are genuinely charismatic performers. In the past few years, I've seen Nicole Kidman, Kevin Kline, John Goodman, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Kevin Spacey, Angela Bassett, Uma Thurman and Alec Baldwin on stage. All have been interesting to watch and some (Hoffman, Kidman, Dennehy and Spacey) are electrifying on stage. Some people still become rich and famous because there are actually very, very good at what they do.
One of them is Christopher Meloni, star of Law and Order and Oz, who takes the lead role of Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller's 1955 tragedy A View from the Bridge at the Gate. Like Anthony LaPaglia, who made his name in Murder One before playing Eddie on Broadway a few years ago, Meloni is the real thing - a tremendously forceful presence with all the confidence that fame brings and none of the self-indulgence. The only traces of his screen career on show here are the focus, discipline and clarity of intent that presumably have to be learned in the industrialised process of a slick TV drama series.
Meloni's inherent quality is more than enough justification for this casting here, but there is a further logic to his presence. A View from the Bridge is part of a larger cultural moment in 1950s America when left-leaning intellectuals began to contemplate blue-collar masculinity - the proletarian archetype - with a strange mixture of attraction and anxiety. Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is an obvious forerunner of Eddie in A View from the Bridge. Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan's film On the Waterfront appeared the year before Miller's play. Both of these attempts to anatomise the macho male were, of course, embodied by Marlon Brando. What makes the play at once so fascinating and so problematic is that it is as much an engagement with the Brando mystique as with the realities of blue-collar life.
There are two ways to deal with this obvious debt, not just to another writer (Williams) but to a particular actor. One is to deny it, which Miller himself tried to do by framing the story of Eddie's obsession with the orphaned niece he has raised as a timeless classical tragedy. The lawyer Alfieri (beautifully played here by John Kavanagh) acts as a chorus and underscores the action with references to Syracuse, Rome, Greece and Carthage. But this sits uneasily with the Freudian world-view that drives the play. Eddie's impotence with his wife (played with typical elegance and intelligence by Cathy Belton), desire for his niece Catherine (Laura Murphy), and hatred for her would-be lover, the illegal immigrant Rodolpho (Paul Reid) create a seething psychological stew flavoured by incestuous desires and repressed homosexuality. The mock-Greek form feels like a neo-classical façade on a modern brothel.
The better option therefore is to embrace the play as a product of its times, with all its borrowings from Williams and Brando and all its neurotic ambiguities about traditional masculinity. This is essentially what the distinguished New York director Mark Brokaw does here, using a broadly realistic set by Mark Wendland and superbly evocative costumes by Leonore McDonagh to create a precise sense of time and place. It is Meloni who makes this a viable option, for he has the scale and the star quality not to fear Brando's shadow but to illuminate with a supremely self-possessed, assertive and authentic performance.
Meloni revivifies method acting, not as a set of tics and mannerisms, but as a search for utter conviction. Everything about him belongs to a 1950s Brooklyn longshoreman - the V-shaped upper body, the heavy walk of a man used to balancing on rough surfaces, the hands that dangle like implements, the pained struggle between the desire to be decent and the physical power to impose his will. He moves with a wonderful combination of raw potency and tentative delicacy. Thoughts pass across his big, open face like clouds projected on a screen. When Alfieri tells us that Eddie's "eyes were like tunnels", we look at Meloni, and they are. Runs until Sept 30 - Fintan O'Toole
Oileán - Siamsa Tíre, Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire
The sheer physicality of the dance and thoroughly modern treatment of Blasket life are shocking in their simplicity. Tralee's Siamsa Tíre has forged a long and formidable reputation on the back of its theatrical productions, many of which pandered to the misty-eyed sentimentalism of an Irish nationalism whose currency is long spent.
This summer's production of Oileán strikes a cord that's altogether more primal, and more universal than anything they have built their reputation on to date. In a production almost totally devoid of spoken language, communication depends on the rhythms tapped on beach and rock and bogland by step dancers who owe little to Riverdance, and everything to the subtle, sophisticated cadences of island life.
Minute vignettes reflect the hardships and realities of life on an Blascaod Mór with wit and intelligence: the arrival of provisions on the boat from Dingle, the collecting of seaweed, the footing of turf and the welcome arrival of a fistful of American dollars in the post. And yes, there's the inevitable American wake, but it's played out without any of the melodrama and just the right tincture of poignancy to work. In between there are strikingly original treatments of hurling (afforded a particularly effective balletic moment), of the rascally carry-on of schoolchildren, and of the final, loathsome leaving of the land.
Seán Ahern and Geraldine Hurley are two of Oileán's solo vocalists, and both embody the startling gentility of the singing style of west Kerry: clear-toned and unadorned. Jonathan Kelliher, dance master, lends a definition and shape to the dance that's almost symmetrical in its disciplined lines, and yet still manages to suggest a freestyle spirit that pervades the entire troupe.
Occasional and fleeting sound problems aside, this is a fine evocation of a time past shot through with a brisk immediacy. The universality of death and the healing power of music, ushered in for the production's moving treatment of the premature death of young Seánín Team Ó Cearna is a sharp reminder of the terrors of island life, a storm's remove from assistance on the mainland.
Siamsa Tíre's timing couldn't be better. Just as news of the State's purchase of an Blascaod Mór hits the news, they've taken a snapshot of island life as it might have been, and in the process, they have reclaimed it from Peig Sayers, whose depression-laden autobiography left a forlorn mark on too many Leaving Cert students' lives.
Music and dance coalesce in Oileán with the simplicity of a congregation not out to prove anything, other than the transience of a way of living, cut short by the power of nature and the exigencies of survival. A salutary tale that would strike a chord for both tourist and local.
The summer season continues at Siamsa Tíre, Tralee, each Mon, Tues and Wed until end Sept - Siobhán Long
