On the Waterfront **** TNT
Friday 13 March 2009 16:55 GMT
Like Arthur Miller’s contemporaneous stage play A View From the Bridge, Elia Kazan’s gritty 1954 film was influenced by the anti-communist witch-hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Both works explore the predicament of conflicting loyalties, transposing events to the harsh, New York quayside, but Steven Berkoff’s innovative and highly stylised production of the movie is a far more expressionistic affair than the equally fine, more naturalistic revival of Miller’s drama currently playing a couple of streets away.
The New York docks are conjured by a bleak, toppling two-dimensional Statue of Liberty, the golden-flamed torch replaced by a longshoreman’s threatening grappling hook. A slow-motion chorus morphs from intimidated dockers, to rain-coated mobsters, then transforms itself into a loft packed with cooing, jutting pigeons.
Against this stark backdrop, Terry Malloy (the failed boxer immortalised on screen by Marlon Brando and here given a performance of swaggering inarticulacy tinged with growing vulnerability by Simon Merrells) is torn between loyalty to his brother and the union boss Johnny Friendly and his love for the sister of the man whom he unwittingly delivered into their murderous hands.
Played out with the intensity of a Greek tragedy, and with Berkoff himself a menacing central presence as the corrupt Friendly, this is a gripping reinvention of a classic which grows in power and poignancy right through to the final, moodily atmospheric curtain call.
Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, SW1 (0845 481 1870) to 25th April (£15-£45, some £10 day seats available)
The New York docks are conjured by a bleak, toppling two-dimensional Statue of Liberty, the golden-flamed torch replaced by a longshoreman’s threatening grappling hook. A slow-motion chorus morphs from intimidated dockers, to rain-coated mobsters, then transforms itself into a loft packed with cooing, jutting pigeons.
Against this stark backdrop, Terry Malloy (the failed boxer immortalised on screen by Marlon Brando and here given a performance of swaggering inarticulacy tinged with growing vulnerability by Simon Merrells) is torn between loyalty to his brother and the union boss Johnny Friendly and his love for the sister of the man whom he unwittingly delivered into their murderous hands.
Played out with the intensity of a Greek tragedy, and with Berkoff himself a menacing central presence as the corrupt Friendly, this is a gripping reinvention of a classic which grows in power and poignancy right through to the final, moodily atmospheric curtain call.
Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, SW1 (0845 481 1870) to 25th April (£15-£45, some £10 day seats available)
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