"Ivo van Hove’s magnificent reconception of Arthur Miller’s 'A View From the Bridge,' takes you into extreme emotional territory that you seldom dare visit in daily life. At the end of its uninterrupted two hours, you are wrung out, scooped out and so exhausted that you’re wide awake...Mr. Strong’s is the most powerful single performance you’re likely to see this year."
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"Director Ivo van Hove digs down and grabs the pulsing, bloody heart of Arthur Miller’s 1956 drama…Mark Strong gives a performance of harrowing intensity as doomed Eddie Carbone…Van Hove stages this elegant and lean tale with almost perverse understatement…The simplicity and restraint, however, gathers to a ferocious and bloody head that leaves you breathless and aghast...The ensemble is uniformly superb, palpably relishing van Hove’s emotionally transparent approach."
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"The buzz around the current production hangs on the inventiveness of director Ivo van Hove. His refinement of the play to essentials, devoid of conventions of costume and set, offers us a truly fresh take on an American classic...A re-do of such an oft-produced play has to have a driving vision-or why go there? The vision here is raw in the primal sense of the word."
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"The lack of clutter is certainly chic, but without the furniture and props Miller specified, some points are unclear…What makes this slight misfit of play and production finally unimportant is that the actors are so devastatingly good…Some of the credit for the cast’s superb work obviously belongs to van Hove; he knew he needed actors who could stand up to his powerful, showy interventions. It’s a fair trade; those interventions probably made this revival viable."
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"Mr. Van Hove...doesn’t seem to care whether any of his over-familiar avant-garde tricks are organically related to the script. Instead, they’re poured over it like a rancid sauce...What you find underneath is a staging that gets to the point of Miller’s play with near-naturalistic directness. Not only does he move actors around fluidly, but he also knows how to pick them...Unfortunately, he neither trusts them nor the play, which is pretentious in its own way."
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"I have to admit I’m of two minds about Van Hove’s 'A View From the Bridge.' My 30-year-old critic self probably would have thrilled to the ballsiness of turning a naturalistic melodrama into a Greek tragedy…But my older-critic self says, 'Leave the damned play alone...' The Germans call this director’s theater, and it’s not for me. Despite a splendid cast led by Mark Strong as Eddie…And especially Nicola Walker, who is heartbreaking as Bea."
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"Strong is manly, magnetic and as persuasive as a heart attack…The stark staging by van Hove, a Broadway newcomer who’s known for stripped-back takes on classics, gets straight to the meat of the story…If there’s a quibble it’s that Eddie’s final fate may be somewhat unclear if you don’t know the play. Also, constant underscoring of sacred music, ambient sounds and percussive beats leads to diminishing returns."
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"Breathe, everybody, breathe! Audiences really need to be reminded of that at the end of Ivo Van Hove’s magnificent production…The show, anchored by a towering performance from Mark Strong as a longshoreman whose willful blindness causes his whole world to come crashing down, is both visually gorgeous and an emotional wipeout…Strong scales those heights, giving an electrifying performance of raw power and terrifying beauty."
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