About the Play:

A View from the Bridge was one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

A View from the Bridge has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Female/Female Scenes, Female/Male Scenes, and Male/Male Scenes.

A View from the Bridge is a full-length drama by Arthur Miller. A Brooklyn labourer, holds family and honour above all else. He and his wife have raised a niece as their own. But his possessive devotion to his niece turns into a dangerous obsession and drives him to actions that betray his family and his ideals. Especially recommended for school and contest use.

A View from the Bridge is a powerful, passionate and gripping drama that uncovers the tensions in a tight knit community with its strict codes of behaviour. Set on waterfront in an Italian-American immigrant community near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, is confident of his place in the working-class neighbourhood he calls home. He lives with his wife, Beatrice and has raised his orphaned niece Catherine like a daughter and loves her like nothing else. He is an honourable, hard working man whose life has been soothingly predictable. He hasn't counted on the arrival of Marco and Rodolpho, two of his wife Beatrice's distant relatives, come as illegal immigrants from Italy to stay in the Carbone's home and find work on the docks; nor has he recognized his true feelings for his beautiful niece, Catherine. When Catherine is attracted to Rodolpho, Eddie’s life is thrown into turmoil. And in due course, what Eddie doesn't know – about her, about life, about his own heart – will have devastating consequences. In this fascinating and provocative exploration of a complicated man and the unravelling of his world, Arthur Miller exposes a society that values different people in tragically different ways.

One of Arthur Miller's masterpieces, A View from the Bridge was originally produced in 1955 on Broadway at the Coronet Theatre as a long one-act, and subsequently revised by the author into a full-length play for a successful production at the New Watergate theatre club in London's West End in 1956. The show enjoyed numerous award-winning revivals in New York and London and tours, has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops, and is regularly performed in regional, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 12 male

What people say:

"[In Arthur Miller's plays] we find the true compassion and catharsis that are as essential to our society as water and fire and babies and air.... Miller awakened in me the taste for all that must be — the empathy and love for the least of us, out of which bursts a gratitude for the poetry of his characters and the greatness of their creator." — Philip Seymour Hoffman

"...a vivid, crackling, idiomatic psychosexual horror tale." — The New York Times

"The play has moments of intense power.... Miller plays on the audience with the skill of a master." — New York Post

About the Playwright:

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) is considered one of the great American playwrights. During the Depression, finances were scarce and he paid for his college tuition by working as a shipping clerk in a New York factory. He later wrote his first plays in college. With a career that spanned over 50 years, he wrote more than thirty plays that transformed American Theatre and proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times. His probing dramas received many awards in his lifetime, including two Emmy awards and three Tony Awards for his plays, a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949, for Death of a Salesman.