What I like about theatre, is that you can take exactly the same script, not change a single word – but just through the emphasis the actors place, or the relative strength of their acting, the meaning gets altered. Similarly, I find that whatever is playing on my mind amplifies certain aspects and dampens others, influencing my interpretation. I felt this really starkly when watching a View from the Bridge.

I had never seen the play before, but understand it to be very much a tragedy centred around an illicit, incestual lust between an uncle and the niece he is raising. The lines or actions from which the audience is meant to infer this growing desire might as well have not existed for me. I have a tween daughter and all I see around me are the various ways in which she is at danger from the world around her. I also have colleagues with children, whose light-touch parenting and laissez-faire attitude towards social media and watching age inappropriate content I find bemusing.

So you see, I watched this as a play about a father finding it hard to let his daughter grow up, but for good reason. A father ferociously fighting to protect her, when the mother is in fact more concerned about herself, choosing not to see the peril the daughter is getting herself into. A father, that will stop at nothing. The kind of father I hope my husband would turn out to be, if the need ever arose.

This sense I had was exacerbated by the actor playing the illegal immigrant fiancée. I have watched ‘Barbie’ multiple times with my daughter, and the resemblance between Rodolpho and Ryan Gosling as Ken is just uncanny. The fact that he is referred to as ‘paper doll’ only adds to the feeling. I imagine it was this that made me side with the uncle in his assessment that there was something ‘not right’ with the boyfriend. In the play, the uncle assumes that Rodlopho is gay; when I watched it – he just came across deceitful. The words of love that were spoken between him and Catherine were not convincing, there was something menacing and predatory about his interactions with the uncle. I just did not trust the guy. I also experienced deep resentment towards the aunt, pushing her niece into his arms. Again, the way her lines were delivered to me felt as if her sole motivation was to get rid of the girl who she saw as competing for her husband’s attention, nothing more. It felt very much like the bad queen in Snow White.  

Now I know that is not what this play is meant to be about, but that is what I saw. And I really enjoyed it, especially the first half, where the tension, slowly mounting, became palpable. The second act for me had too many stop/start cut scenes.

Separate to all of the above, is the theme of immigration – men leaving their families in search of ways to put food on the table. The desperation. The human impulse to on one had help, but on the other expect gratitude in return. So much to unpack in today’s context. Including the growing fear many women have about their rights being threatened by immigrants coming from culture that do not respect women.