Casting announced for Headlong’s A View from the Bridge

Headlong has announced casting for its new co-production of Arthur Miller’s classic A View from the Bridge.

Opening on 8 September 2023 at the Octagon Theatre Bolton, it’s co-produced with the Octagon, Chichester Festival Theatre and the Rose Theatre.

Jonathan Slinger (Hamlet and Macbeth, RSC, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, West End) will play the role of Eddie, marking his first time in a Miller production.

He is joined by Nancy Crane (Summer and Smoke and Chimerica, Almeida), who will be the first woman to play the role of Alfieri in a production helmed by Headlong artistic director Holly Race Roughan (replacing the originally announced Jaz Woodcock-Stewart) that “looks at the psychology of the play and its gender politics afresh”.

Roughan said: “Mounting the first major revival in the UK for nearly a decade, I am eager to explore its startlingly relevant themes with today’s audiences: the human price of a country’s immigration policies, ripping into the personal roar of suppressed feelings and the tenderness of romantic love. As with all my work, I am very interested in the thin membrane between the unconscious and the conscious.

“I am also excited by the play’s brutal and honest exploration of masculinity and how that sits with a modern audience. By casting Alfieri as a woman I hope to illuminate further the presence of the ‘feminine’ emotional intelligence in the play, and its offer to help build a new kind of masculinity.”

The cast will also feature Kirsty Bushell as Beatrice, Rachelle Diedericks as Catherine, Elijah Holloway as Louis/Immigration Officer, Luke Newberry as Rodolpho, Tommy Sim’aan as Marco and Lamin Touray as Mike/Immigration Officer.

The creative team includes associate director Emily Ling Williams, set and costume designer Moi Tran, set and costume associate Mona Camille, composer and sound designer Max Perryment, sound associate Keegan Curan, lighting designer Alex Fernandes, movement director Malik Nashad Sharpe, voice and dialect coach Aundrea Fudge, fight director Kev McCurdy and intimacy director Yarit Dor. The casting director is Becky Paris.

Set on the Brooklyn waterfront, A View from the Bridge sees orphaned Catherine fall for her handsome, newly arrived cousin Rodolpho, an illegal migrant. Their romance is encouraged by her aunt Beatrice but stirs complex feelings in her uncle, Eddie Carbone. As tensions rise, their story spins inexorably beyond control.

The production will play at the Octagon Theatre Bolton (8 to 30 September), Chichester Festival Theatre (6 to 28 October) and Rose Theatre, Kingston (31 October to 11 November).