Awakening the Political Body: Affective Strategies in Ivo van Hove’s A View from the Bridge

Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge(1955) reimagines classical tragedy through the moral turmoil of ordinary lives, situating desire, law, and betrayal within the social dynamics of postwar Brooklyn. While traditional productions have relied on psychological realism to elicit Aristotelian catharsis, Ivo van Hove’s 2014 revival radically disrupts this model. Rejecting naturalistic staging and narrative resolution, his minimalist and physically immersive approach provokes affective rupture and political reflection. Drawing on affect theory—particularly the works of Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, and Erin Hurley—, this paper argues that van Hove reconfigures tragedy as a site of affective confrontation, in which bodily unease and sensory tension expose the ideological structures embedded in Miller’s text. Rather than reinforcing emotional identification, the production implicates spectators as embodied participants, prompting them to recognise how personal conflicts are entangled with broader systems of patriarchy, sexuality, immigration, and moral complicity. In doing so, van Hove transforms affect from a vehicle of catharsis into a mode of political awakening.