A View From the Bridge, by Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller... Everything I have read by this playwright is brilliant. He has such a skill for creating human tragedies - tragedies that are just as devastating and just as tense and just as inevitable as those of Shakespeare, but with a tragic hero who is just a normal person.
Here's something that made me smile: the protagonist of this play has a symbolic name. His name is Eddie Carbone: Carbone is an Italian surname that means coal, as in carbon, as in one of the most common elements on earth. He's just a normal, everyday guy. It's those small symbolic details that really spark this Word Wolf's hunger.
This play is about the inexorable unravelling of Eddie Carbone. At the beginning of the play, he and his wife Beatrice take in two of Eddie's cousins - Marco and Rodolpho - who are illegal immigrants from Italy. Before long, Eddie's niece Catherine, who lives with them, has started falling in love with Rodolpho. The idea of losing Catherine, and moreover losing her to a man Eddie suspects is homosexual, upsets Eddie deeply, and from that point onwards he does everything in his power to prevent their getting married, despite the self-destructive implications.
I think this is a play about concealment. Concealment and exposure. This theme quite possibly comes from the influence of McCarthyism on Miller - you see the same ideas in the Crucible, in naming names and exposing sinners. Here, though, it is somewhat upside down, in that the community are largely trying to conceal the immigrants and defend their innocence rather than striving to expose them.
And equally, Eddie has some secrets that he is trying incredibly hard to conceal, to the extent that he doesn't even realise the truth himself until some way through the second act. I'm going to give some stuff away now, because in plays such as this it is almost impossible to have any kind of discussion without spoiling it. Sorry about that.
The first truth Eddie is trying to ignore is that he has developed an attraction towards Catherine. Yep, his niece. This is actually foreshadowed from the start - Eddie is strangely resistant to letting Catherine get a job (and thus move out); then he compliments her, calling her 'Madonna'; at the start of Act Two he tells her to remove her high heels. Of course, this all could be interpreted as Eddie being a slightly overprotective uncle - an idea that Eddie himself clings to - but as the play progresses his ulterior motive becomes more clear. Why does he tell her to remove her heels? Because he's afraid of her growing up? Or because he's afraid of other men finding her attractive and stealing her away? Or because he is finding her attractive and doesn't want to risk showing it? It all culminates, of course, in Eddie kissing Catherine, an undeniable show of his unspeakable attraction to her.
Yet there is something else hinted at throughout the play, an implication that is never made explicit, but which is definitely another source of tension. I think it could definitely be construed that Eddie is harbouring a homosexual attraction towards Rodolpho. The most overt manifestation of this is, of course, when Eddie kisses Rodolpho (such a shocking plot-twist I nearly dropped the book) but I think there are hints throughout. Eddie's relationship with his wife isn't in the best place, for a start, though this could be down to Catherine rather than down to Eddie's sexual orientation. And maybe I'm reading too deep and searching for meaning where there is none, but Beatrice's line 'Eddie, I wish there was one guy you couldn't tell me things about!' seems to be suggesting he talks about men a lot. Is that foreshadowing...?
Anyway, all this underlying tension works to reinforce the inevitability of Eddie's downfall, because its these primal desires that he cannot control that are controlling him. In Arthur Miller's introduction, he writes that he wants the tension to derive from knowing the end result - he wants Eddie's demise to be inevitable, inexorable, and for the audience to watch it unfold in an almost dramatic-ironic way. And I think he achieves that. At the start of the play, Eddie vehemently supports the Italian immigrants, warning his family 'you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away', but by the end of Act Two he is so agitated that he tips off the immigration office. Such a change demonstrates the lengths he will go to to keep Catherine (and/or Rodolpho!) for himself. Eddie is so desperately blinded, at the behest of his tragic flaw, that it can surely only end badly.
This was such a good play. I bet it would be absolutely brilliant onstage. It just goes to show that tragic heroes don't have to fall from great heights. Powerful drama can still be created, because even normal human beings can have dark, destructive secrets.