A new revival of A View from the Bridge, one of the great works of 20th cenutry American theatre, starring Dominic West and Callum Scott Howeels, will transfer to London this spring after a sold-out, month-long season in Bath.
Arthur Miller's 1955 play, which unpacks the destructive nature of obsessive love, will open at Theatre Royal Haymarket on May 23, and run for 10 weeks.
Tickets for the show at the Ustinov Studio sold out in under an hour, and the star-studded cast features BAFTA Award winner West (The Wire, The Crown) as lead protagonist Eddie, Olivier and Tony Award nominee Kate Fleetwood (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) as his wife Beatrice, and Welsh BAFTA Cymru Award winner Callum Scott Howells (It's A Sin) as her cousin Rodolpho.
Nia Towle (Rocketman, Persuasion) and Martin Marquez (Les Misérables, The Crown) also star.
The new production has been directed by Olivier award-winning director Lindsay Posner, whose credits include The Old Vic's The Winslow Boy (2013), The Almeida's House of Games, and The Savoy's Fiddler on the Roof (2007).
This is not Posner's first production of Miller's beloved play: he previously directed A View from the Bridge in 2009 for a production at the Duke of York's Theatre, which received a number of positive reviews.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright's drama has been adapted countless times for both stage and screen over the last 70 years.
First premiering on Broadway in 1955, the play is set in Fifties New York, and details what happens when Italian-American dockworker Eddie welcomes two cousins from Sicily, Marco and Rodolpho, into his home. Soon Rodolpho and Catherine, Eddie's niece, take a shine to one another, setting in motion a tragic chain of events.
Posner's production promises to be a thrilling revival of Miller's work: the rest of the creative team includes Peter McKintosh (The Handmaiden's Tale, Cloud Nine, Boston marriage) as designer, Paul Pyant (The Winter's Tale, Arcadia) as lighting designer, Gregory Clarke (The Third Man, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as sound designer and Ed Lewis (A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, The Best Man) as composer.
Although West is best-known as a TV and film star, the actor played Simon Gray's Butley at the Duchess Theatre in 2011, and his performance was well-received: "Butley hurls himself towards destruction with a reckless vitality, and West certainly brings out that aspect of the part. He burns up the stage with his energy and allows a malicious gleam to come into his eye," said one critic. He also starred in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Donmar.
Meanwhile Scott Howells has featured in a number of stage productions including Cabaret (2022) and Romeo and Julie (2023) for which he was also well-reviewed.
"Howells has a low-key Paul Mescal vibe, offset by an exaggerated slouch and De Niro-ish head-wags and grimaces: his performance is strange and mannered but intensely watchable," said the Standard of his leading performance in Romeo and Julie.
