Eddie (Gavin Rutherford) seated in the foreground. Rodolpho (Paul Waggott) and Catherine (Acushla-Tara Sutton) standing in the background.

Eddie and his wife Beatrice live with Beatrice’s dead-sis­ter­’s daugh­ter, Cath­er­ine in Brook­lyn, New York. Beatrice’s two cous­ins, Marco and Rodolpho, are com­ing into the coun­try (illeg­ally) to stay with them in order to earn money to send back to Italy.  Cath­er­ine and Rodolpho get on really well. Eddie is sus­pi­cious of Rodolpho’s motives. Is he really into Cath­er­ine? Or is he just after a green-card?

Susan Wilson dir­ects a crack­ing pro­duc­tion of Arthur Miller­’s A view from the bridge. Excel­lent per­form­ances from Gav­in Ruther­ford (Eddie) and Acushla-Tara Sut­ton (Cath­er­ine) gives the show a strong centre for the oth­er char­ac­ters to move around. Ruther­ford plays the pat­ri­arch Eddie as a strong, blunt, straight talk­ing man. His agit­a­tion is palp­able as Eddie’s des­per­ate attempts to pro­tect his step-daugh­ter lead him to a law­yer. Sut­ton is sweetly naive as Cath­er­ine when estab­lish­ing her rela­tion­ship to Eddie and Beatrice. They are strongly sup­por­ted by the oth­er cast mem­bers. Jude Gib­son is a lov­ing and slightly envi­ous wife. Paul Wag­gott is subtly con­front­a­tion­al as Rodolpho, while Alex Greig as Marco is charm­ingly sto­ic. Chris­toph­er Brougham’s law­yer Alfieri sets the scene and closes the play. He gives us a sense that some­thing ter­rible, yet inev­it­able is going to hap­pen. It’s pretty good to see stu­dents from Whitireia on the stage in this pro­fes­sion­al pro­duc­tion as well. They will be learn­ing a lot from this exper­i­enced cast and crew while wan­der­ing around John Hodgkins’ mar­velous multi-level set which is nicely lit by Mar­cus McShane.

Go and see this clas­sic Amer­ic­an play.