A View from the Bridge

Description

A View from the Bridge is a tragic masterpiece of the inexorable unravelling of a man Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of decency and of honour. For Eddie, it's a privilege to take in his wife's cousins, straight off the boat from Italy. But, as his niece begins to fall for one of them, it's clear that it's not just, as Eddie claims, that he's too strange, too sissy, too careless for her, but that something bigger, deeper is wrong, and wrong inside Eddie, in a way he can't face. Something which threatens the happiness of their whole family.

American dramatist Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915. In 1938 Miller won awards for his comedy The Grass Still Grows. His major achievement was Death of a Salesman, which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for drama and the 1949 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. The Crucible was aimed at the widespread congressional investigation of subversive activities in the US; the drama won the 1953 Tony Award. Miller's autobiography, Timebends- A Life was published in 1987.

"[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, from the Foreword