Theatre review Dissection of the American dream speaks loudly now

In 2014, the director Ivo van Hove’s Young Vic production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge drew comparisons to monumental Greek drama. Lightning has struck twice with this magnificent, shuddering production that perfects the art of doing less for more effect and is staged at the same West End venue to which its predecessor transferred.

- Arifa Akbar

Van Hove, known for giving the classics his own stamp, steps back here, it seems, letting the cast - and what a cast this is - not just inhabit their parts but also somehow become them. They articulate the devastating truths in this play about the corruptions of the American dream and the toxic inheritance handed down from fathers to sons. How relevant these truths seem today: it is as if Miller is speaking directly about now. A line can be drawn from the play's themes of selling faulty equipment to the government and the unaccountability of corrupt capitalist patriarchs to Trumpian facts and delusions, Grenfell and the Covid-era PPE scandal.